Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture 9781138860278

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Contents......Page 10
List of Figures......Page 12
Acknowledgments......Page 14
Introduction: Human Rights in Precarious Times......Page 18
1 Spectrally Human: African Child Soldier Narratives at the Limits of Legal Personhood......Page 47
2 Disturbing the Archive: Human Rights Storytelling of Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi......Page 86
3 Overexposed: Compounded Vulnerability and Continuing Liability in Fiction of Bhopal......Page 130
4 Re-purposing Témoignage: Humanitarian Spaces and Subjects in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières......Page 173
5 In the Aftermath of Mass Murder: Visuality and Vertigo in the Indonesia Films of Joshua Oppenheimer......Page 215
References......Page 257
Index......Page 272

Citation preview

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Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture

This book responds to the failures of human rights—the way its institutions and norms reproduce geopolitical imbalances and social exclusions— through an analysis of how literary and visual culture can make visible human rights claims that are foreclosed in official discourses. Moore investigates the intersection of vulnerability studies and human rights through an analysis of the relationship between vulnerability theory, normative human rights genres—such as the legal covenant, the human rights report, and reportage—and literary and visual culture in five human rights contexts over the past fifty years: UN human rights instruments and child soldiers in ­Nigerian literature; human rights reporting and novels that address state-sponsored ethno-cide in Zimbabwe; the international humanitarian campaigns and disaster capitalism in fiction of Bhopal, India; the work of Médecins Sans Frontières in the Sahel, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma as represented in various media campaigns and in photo/graphic narratives; and, finally, human rights campaigns, fiction, and film that bring Indonesia’s history of anti-leftist violence into contemporary public debate. These case studies underscore how human rights norms are always subject to conditions of imaginative representation, and how literature and visual culture can generate new forms of human rights discourse. Expanding feminist theories of embodied and imposed vulnerability, Moore demonstrates how vulnerability theory can reveal the differential distribution of both rights and precariousness in specific contexts and offer an alternative to normative rights discourse organized around the liberal subject and the nation-state. In place of conventional victims and agents, the intersection of vulnerability and human rights opens up readings of human rights claims and suffering that are, at once, embodied and shareable, and, at the same time, demonstrates that these discourses are themselves vulnerable to cooptation. Alexandra Schultheis Moore is Associate Professor of English and program faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

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29 Literature and the Glocal City Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary Edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos 30 Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture Post-Millennial Perspectives of the End of the World Edited by Monica Germanà and Aris Mousoutzanis 31 Rethinking Empathy through Literature Edited by Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim 32 Music and Identity in Postcolonial British SouthAsian Literature Christin Hoene 33 Representations of War, Migration, and Refugeehood Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Daniel H. Rellstab and Christiane Schlote 34 Liminality and the Short Story Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing Edited by Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann 35 Asian American Literature and the Environment Edited by Lorna Fitzsimmons, Youngsuk Chae, and Bella Adams

36 Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture Basuli Deb 37 Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness Layla AbdelRahim 38 Singularity and Transnational Poetics Edited by Birgit Mara Kaiser 39 National Poetry, Empires and War David Aberbach 40 Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture Technogothics Edited by Justin D. Edwards 41 Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities Postcolonial Approaches Edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan 42 Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth-Century Humanities Literary Theory, History, Philosophy Edited by Marina Grishakova and Silvi Salupere

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43 Gender, Race, and American Science Fiction Reflections on Fantastic Identities Jason Haslam 44 Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature The Architectural Void Patricia García 45 New Directions in 21st-Century Gothic The Gothic Compass Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien 46 Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine Edited by Patricia NovilloCorvalán 47 Institutions of World Literature Writing, Translation, Markets Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen 48 Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds Edited by Mari Hatavara, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä 49 Women Writers and the Occult in Literature and Culture Female Lucifers, Priestesses, and Witches Miriam Wallraven

50 Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era Edited by Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic 51 Race and Popular Fantasy Literature Habits of Whiteness Helen Young 52 Subjectivity and the Reproduction of Imperial Power Empire’s Individuals Daniel F. Silva 53 Ireland and Ecocriticism Literature, History and Environmental Justice Eóin Flannery 54 Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture Modern and Contemporary Perspectives Edited by Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge 55 New Perspectives on Detective Fiction Mystery Magnified Edited by Casey A. Cothran and Mercy Cannon 56 Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture Alexandra Schultheis Moore

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Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture Alexandra Schultheis Moore

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Alexandra Schultheis Moore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moore, Alexandra Schultheis. Vulnerability and security in human rights literature and visual culture / by Alexandra Schultheis Moore. pages cm. — (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature; 56) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Human rights in literature. 2. Vulnerability (Personality trait) in literature. 3. Violence in literature. 4. Law and literature. 5. Motion pictures and literature. I. Title. PN56.H79M66 2015 809'.933581—dc23 2015022667 ISBN: 978-1-138-86027-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71654-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

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For Chloë and Samantha

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Human Rights in Precarious Times

xi xiii 1

1 Spectrally Human: African Child Soldier Narratives at the Limits of Legal Personhood

30

2 Disturbing the Archive: Human Rights Storytelling of Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi

69

3 Overexposed: Compounded Vulnerability and Continuing Liability in Fiction of Bhopal

113

4 Re-purposing Témoignage: Humanitarian Spaces and Subjects in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières

156

5 In the Aftermath of Mass Murder: Visuality and Vertigo in the Indonesia Films of Joshua Oppenheimer

198

References Index

240 255

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List of Figures

3.1 Burial of an unknown child. INDIA. Bhopal. 1984. ©Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos. Reprinted by permission. 4.1 MSF Team Leader Juliette Fournot and photographer Didier Lefèvre. The Photographer ©2009 by Emmanuel Guibert. Reprinted by permission of First Second Books, an imprint of Henry Holt & Company, LLC. All rights reserved. 4.2 House arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Copyright Guy Delisle; used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly. 5.1 Adi Zulkadry and Anwar Congo. Photo by Anonymous. Still from The Act of Killing (2012). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real. 5.2 Herman Koto. Still from The Act of Killing (2012). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real. 5.3 Inong with glasses. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real. 5.4 Adi Rukun and Amir Siahaan. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real. 5.5 Samsir and his daughter. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

127

181 188 217 218 227 231 233

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Acknowledgments

The book was written over many years and has incurred many personal and professional debts. I grateful to Dean Tim Johnston for granting my request for a research leave in 2009–2010, when I first began to work through these ideas. During that year, I thought I would just spend a month or two to complete an invited submission and then return to a different project. Little did I know at the time that the invitation to contribute a chapter would lead to six years of research and writing that I draw on in this book. Kerry Bystrom, Walt Collins, Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo, Wendy Hesford, Meg Jensen, Margaret Jolly, Glenn Mitoma, and Gina Wisker, in addition to several anonymous readers, provided helpful comments on early versions of some of the material included here. I also received generative feedback from participants at panel sessions of the African Literature Association, American Comparative Literature Annual Convention, Modern Language Association, Society for the Study of Comparative Literature and the Arts, and the Negotiating Human Rights conference at Aarhus University. Mary Ellis Gibson and Christian Moraru also provided insight into the shape of the project as a whole. More recently I have had the great fortune to talk with Chris Abani and Joshua Oppenheimer, two artists I admire tremendously, about their work. I thank them for being as generous in person as in their writing and films. I am humbled that Ngawang Sangdrol has shared her story with me over the years, and profoundly grateful for her friendship and trust. The community of scholars in human rights and the humanities and gather each year at the American Comparative Literature Association conference has helped to sustain my work. Thank you to Liz Anker, Stephanie Athey, Eleni Coundouriotis, Emily Davis, Lisa Eck, Barbara Harlow, Madelaine Hron, Mukti Mangharam, Laura Murphy, Hania Musiol, Angela ­Naimou, Crystal Parikh, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Sue Spearey, Brenda Carr Vellino, and Sarah Waisvisz, among others, for your conversation and camaraderie. Many of you have become good friends as our conversations stretch into each new year and other collaborations, and I am always energized and challenged by your work. I have worked on this book while co-editing three collections of essays on human rights in literary and cultural studies, and I have been inspired by the groundbreaking scholarship of the many contributors to these volumes. Work

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xiv Acknowledgments on the collections also introduced me to the wonderful Cassandra Ford. I owe an additional thanks to her for lending her sharp eye to the manuscript. Jim Dawes, Greg Mullins, and Joey Slaughter have been interlocutors throughout this process. Thank you for your intellectual and professional generosity, for your friendship, for always being willing to answer my many questions, and for sharing your extraordinary work. Special thanks are due, too, to Belinda Walzer and Sandy Hartwiger, who helped gather some of the initial materials for the book and whom I am honored to have now as friends and colleagues. My profound gratitude goes to Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg for sharing so much of this intellectual journey. We met in the lobby of the MLA’s Human Rights and the Humanities Conference in 2005 and have been working together as readers, authors, and editors ever since. Thank you for sharing your passion, poetry, and keen sense of justice and commitment as well as for everything you have contributed to this project over the years and as it finds its final form. On a personal level, my in-laws, Bridget and Jim Irish, provided us with their home in Durango, Colorado for the year in which this book began. Thank you for your unstinting love and kindness, which includes excusing the many holidays I have spent by myself at the computer and extends far beyond that. To my family—Howard Engelson, Erik Engelson, Rob Schultheis, and Nancy Craft—thank you for your unwavering love and support, no matter where we are. Finally, to Ben, Tad, Bug, and Sam, I wouldn’t want to do any of this without you (and the dogs). *** Chapters one, two and three may be traced to earlier essays, although their scope and arguments have changed substantially since those beginnings. Select passages from chapter one appear in: Schultheis, Alexandra W. “Global Specters: Child Soldiers in the Post–National Fiction of Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani.” In Emerging African Voices, Ed. Walter P. Collins, III, 13–51. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010. Portions are reprinted by permission of Cambria Press. Selected passages from chapter two appear in: Schultheis, Alexandra W. “Mourning and the Angel of History in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins.” In Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing, edited by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker, 41–64. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. Excerpts from that earlier essay appear courtesy of Koninklijke Brill NV. Chapter three expands and revises the argument made in “Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières.” Special issue on Humanitarian Responsibility, eds. Kerry Bystrom and Glenn Mitoma. Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 1 (March 2013): 87–102 (portions reprinted by permission), as well as the revised reprint, “Témoignage and Responsibility in Photo/Graphic

Acknowledgments  xv

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Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières.” Jensen, Meg and Margaretta Jolly, eds. WE SHALL BEAR WITNESS: LIFE NARRATIVES AND HUMAN RIGHTS. ©2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 175–195. I am also grateful for permission to reprint the images that appear in chapters three, four, and five.

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Introduction

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Human Rights in Precarious Times

On June 17, 1992, Ngawang Sangdrol, a fifteen-year-old member of the Garu Nunnery in Tibet, was arrested and imprisoned for shouting ­pro-independence slogans at a demonstration in Lhasa. This was not her first time in prison. Two years earlier, on August 21, 1990, at age thirteen, she was arrested and detained on a similar charge at the Norbu Lingka (the former summer palace of the Dalai Lama). At the time she was one of the world’s youngest political prisoners. Upon her second arrest, Sangdrol was sent to Drapchi prison, which is notorious for its poor conditions, torture, and other forms of abuse. Her initial sentence of three years was extended multiple times for alleged protests in prison to a total of twenty-one years (consolidated from twenty-three years)—another landmark for her, this time as the female Tibetan political prisoner with the longest sentence.1 The centerpiece of the charges against her was her participation with thirteen others in illicitly recording protest songs in their cells on a smuggled tape recorder. Known in the international human rights campaigns upon their behalf as the ­Drapchi 14 or the singing nuns of Drapchi prison, their case gained momentum when one of the four cassette tapes they had secretly recorded avoided confiscation and was smuggled out of prison under a pile of compost, where it then embarked on its own covert journey out of the country and into the office of the Tibet Information Network, a human rights organization based in London.2 The Lhasa City Intermediate People’s Court Criminal Sentencing Document No. 42 (1993), which detailed the judicial response to the nuns’ recordings, charged them with the “crime of counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” and significantly extended their prison sentences, in addition to suspending their political rights for one to three years after their releases. The sentencing document also argued that the women “should be severely punished according to the law” because they have “refused to be reformed” through labor and because their “attitude toward confession was abominable.”3 As she has testified many times, including before the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Human Rights, Sangdrol experienced severe physical and mental torture during her imprisonments, including “different types of electric batons and prods, pipes, canes of different size and the use of the

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2 Introduction ‘airplane’ hanging system” and prolonged stays in solitary confinement.4 After serving eleven years of her sentence, Sangdrol was released to the home of her sister in Lhasa, and on March 28, 2003, she arrived in the US for medical treatment. In 2011, she became a US citizen, and she has continued to share her story in order to protest human rights abuses in Tibet. Told in this way, Sangdrol’s story reads as an exemplary human rights narrative. It details the subject’s remarkable journey from protest to ­torture to the denial of political rights to full citizenship (and, correspondingly, from childhood to adulthood), made possible by the transnational circuit of free expression (through the traveling cassette) and human rights discourses (through the campaigns of numerous nongovernmental organizations as well as the work of the US Congress and the United Nations).5 And of course in crucial ways that is accurate. However, in reconfirming Sangdrol as the liberal subject of human rights, this narrative fails to disclose more complex operations of human rights and the subject who bears them. I sketch some of those complexities below in order to offer an initial map to this book’s broad concerns with the vulnerable subject and the temporality of human rights. I have written elsewhere about the singing nuns and the crucial role that the Dui Hua Foundation and its Executive Director John Kamm played in securing Sangdrol’s release and passage to the US.6 To highlight a key point, in a wide-ranging profile for The New York Times Magazine in 2002, Kamm discussed his notably successful approach, which employs the techniques he developed as a corporate sales executive and President of the Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, to cement relationships and build deals for human rights with Chinese partners: “‘I manufacture and sell prisoner lists,’ he says. ‘I know a sale is made when I hear about a release.’”7 It is easy to critique such language as a particularly striking example of what Upendra Baxi has decried as “the trade-related, market-friendly human rights paradigm.”8 One example of how this paradigm transforms the subject into an object of exchange may be that Sangdrol only learned that she would be transferred out of Lhasa in a preliminary, vague meeting with government officials (where she was assured “everything will be fine”) and then, some time later, when a car arrived at her sister’s home and Sangdrol was told she would be leaving the country immediately. She has recounted how, “[w]hen the time came to leave, I could not speak. We both knew we would never see each other again until Tibet is free.”9 Sangdrol travelled under high security to Beijing where she was transferred to the care of the US Department of State and boarded a flight to Washington, DC. Although Sangdrol expresses only gratitude for the tremendous efforts of so many people and organizations that were undertaken to gain her release and safety, she did not determine the unfolding of those efforts, nor her destination. Although not referencing the Drapchi 14 in particular, Pheng Cheah argues against reading a human rights case such as Sangdrol’s in terms of a US versus China ideological struggle, stating, “The two poles of

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Introduction  3 that binary opposition are complicitous. The fight is between different models of capitalist accumulation attempting to assert economic hegemony.”10 Human rights norms mask this struggle and allow debates over cultural difference to substitute for those that might generate alternative approaches to justice, alternatives not conceptually grounded in the figure of the liberal subject and played out according to the neoliberal and geopolitical priorities of hegemonic states. I do not wish to collapse the differences between US and Chinese human rights records—predatory sovereignty targets specific populations and persons in calibrated, differentiated ways; however, the imbrications of human rights and capitalist development that Cheah details highlight the transnational forces of n ­ eoliberalism and s­ ecuritization in shaping normative human rights. Two aspects of the interrelationship among human rights, neoliberalism, and securitization provide the foundations for my project. First, as has been ably demonstrated by numerous legal, political, and cultural theorists and historians, the development and distribution of normative human rights is inseparable from European imperialism as a history of capitalist accumulation and its legacies. The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR) makes clear that the UDHR’s principles (and those of the ensuing covenants that further define and secure those principles), while ostensibly timeless and universal, are grounded in a linear historical narrative of modernity-as-progress which will be realized through the liberal subject, the nation–state, and the international order of states provided by the UN. The historical underpinnings of this world order are evident throughout the UDHR, including in its early reference to the atrocities of World War II in an echo of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime “Four Freedoms” speech. With the clause, “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the UDHR produces the very subjects (“the common people”) in the image of Roosevelt’s earlier US wartime audience, on whose behalf the document speaks.11 And the clause positions the bearers of human rights as the historical subjects of a world order that the UDHR promises to help build. Critics of normative human rights rightly argue that such a “‘progress narrative,’ the transformation of a victim to a survivor and then to an activist,”12 masks human rights as an exclusionary, imperializing form of governmentality that re-produces its own ideal subjects. To address this problem, I read for the heterotemporality of human rights events and their representation: their structural roots, lasting legacies, and the different temporal entanglements, to borrow from Achille Mbembe, in which the bearers of egregious wrongs understand their own experiences, desires, and possible futures. The heterotemporality of human rights insists that a legal judgment, financial settlement, healed wound, or oath of citizenship provides only a

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4 Introduction partial measure of the path toward justice, which itself must remain openended and negotiable. Heterotemporality quickly becomes visible when the focus of attention shifts from the chronological and teleological human rights success story of Sangdrol’s release, citizenship, and continued activism to her expression of heterogeneous temporalities in her testimony and in the songs the nuns wrote and sang. The temporal rhythms of an electric shock or a beating, the ensuing blackout and gradual recovery—of a hunger strike or solitary confinement; of losing track of time while trying secretly to repeat 1,000 prayers each day in prison; of singing of the Dalai Lama’s current incarnation to the four-beat rhythm of a Chinese pop song; of a day behind iron bars in relation to, metaphorically, an imagined future of neverending Tibetan independence when “the sun/From beneath the clouds shall appear”13; of the songs’ initial recordings versus their subsequent playings; of exile; of living in the aftermath of prolonged torture, when its physical and mental effects still reverberate daily—none of these temporalities (physical, spiritual, emotional, political) can be sublimated to nor concluded by an oath of citizenship or the triumphalist narrative of the rescued human rights subject. That the experience of heterotemporality is a constitutive feature of embodied and sentient life speaks to the need for human rights discourses that can reflect those differences and the heterogeneous forms of justice toward which they lean. This leads to my second main concern: that heterotemporality defines intervals through which many different subject positions emerge and become visible. It discloses the false opposition between the bare life of the victim, on the one hand, and the liberal subject, on the other. The heterotemporality of material and social life demands close attention to specific contexts and is at odds with the notion that human rights can transform the vulnerable subject—read as embodied, weak, passive, perhaps deficient, and open to harm—into the liberal subject of modernity through the magical combination of freedom and security. The inclusion in the UDHR of Roosevelt’s rhetoric of positive and negative freedoms—freedom of speech and worship; freedom from fear and want—invokes a complex relationship between vulnerability on the one hand and security-as-freedom on the other in normative human rights. This relationship ties security and freedom to the sovereignty of the state and the individual, liberal subject. As Joseph Slaughter has demonstrated in his reading of legal personhood, “the development of human rights law becomes a story of the arrival of the individual human being on the world stage as a subject of international rights and duties, a subject constituted by international law with a kind of inviolable and inalienable individual, or personal sovereignty.”14 That this subject can only ever be a fictional one, albeit one whose legal standing has material effects, is manifest in the paradoxes that attend it. For example, Kamm’s message that “human rights groups around the world have worked tirelessly on behalf of Ngawang Sangdrol’s behalf for many years, and will take

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Introduction  5 comfort and pride” in her release,15 reflects the paradoxes inherent in the equation of rights as freedom. The reckoning that makes rights and freedom equivalencies does so by masking those human rights groups’ geopolitical and biopolitical forms of governmentality that necessarily delimit freedom in order to manufacture it elsewhere, in the future, and in pre-determined forms. In other words, it was only as an object of exchange between superpowers—mediated by the discourses that human rights groups and state parties share of economic and geopolitical calculations of risk, profit, and securitization—that Sangdrol could be re-produced as the free, secure(d) subject of rights in the US. Inderpal Grewal summarizes the effects of this process in her definition of human rights as “a regime of truth disseminated through transnational connectivities which came to power as a mode of transnational governmentality producing technologies of welfare alongside modes of disciplinary and sovereign power.”16 Her extensive critiques of human rights illuminate the operations of this regime of truth according the neoliberal principles of the privatization of risk, opportunity, and freedom that subtend many egregious violations; and her critiques demonstrate how claims for women’s rights in particular reinforce neoliberal ideologies by equating freedom with choice as the desired outcome for the sovereign subject. Choice as the ultimate expression of freedom cements the relationship between consumerism, security, and sovereignty. I draw on Grewal’s definition in this book in order to better understand human rights’ “technologies of welfare alongside modes of disciplinary and sovereign power.” To do so, however, I read human rights in ways of which she might not fully approve—not as a regime of truth so much as a mode of operation whereby contingent norms function materially and discursively to define violations, produce subjects, and structure particular claims toward justice, yet whose bodies, histories, and effects are never pre-determined and always exceed the normative terms through which they emerge. In addition, I broaden the ideological context of human rights to include neoliberalism in concert with securitization, located in the private–state networks devoted to border security, incarceration, moral policing, and militarized humanitarian intervention in the name of human rights. Many contemporary political, legal, and cultural critics echo Grewal to argue that human rights constitute a regime that is implicitly imperialist and too often sanctions violence in the name of paternalistic care. I take a somewhat different approach, which is to examine the different ways in which human rights in specific contexts function to open up or foreclose particular paths toward justice, recognize or exclude particular subjects, and delimit or render possible various futures. Stephen Hopgood has recently characterized normative human rights as a “global structure of laws, courts, norms, and organizations that raise money, write reports, run international campaigns, open local offices, lobby governments, and claim to speak with a singular authority in the name of humanity as a whole.”17 Certainly economic and

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6 Introduction political interests form the skeleton of that structure; however, my focus is on the operations of that “claim to speak” (and, in chapter five, following Nicholas Mirzoeff, of that right to look)—with the discourses, silences, speakers, audiences, forms and genres in the name of a social imaginary of human rights as self-evident—which I argue is never singular or static. Comprising that claim to speak and right to look are first the normative human rights discourses generated by the various entities Hopgood cites. These are the international and national declarations and legal conventions as well as human rights reports, humanitarian appeals, and journalistic reportage (both visual and verbal) that together work to frame and document violations and to engender a response to them. Within that matrix, human rights principles and laws provide the infrastructure through which claims and claimants are articulated. Reading human rights as neither a panacea nor a curse, I follow Marianne Constable’s insistence that legal speech acts should be considered discursively rather than as a set of rules in order to understand how they provide shared, evolving conceptual norms of social life. She argues, “In a world of law as language, that is, the authority and so-called sovereignty of the state is as much a matter of ‘juris-diction’ as of power of violence.”18 This does not mean that the law avoids violence, nor that it unilaterally defines a social norm, but that “[a]s persuasive utterances, the legal speech acts of representatives of official law as well as the claims of their critics are performative and passionate, designed to evoke in their respective hearers a shared sense of obligation that is not only conventionally performed but also a matter of desire.”19 Legal discourse provides, in other words, a shared occasion, grammar, and vocabulary for negotiating what should be, according to the legal principles, a set of shared concerns. Even these occasions are not singular, but “take place incompletely against a background of imperfect—­incomplete, habitual, overlapping, often routine, yet interruptible—ways of speaking or of knowing our language and the world. Such imperfection refers not only to the open-endedness of a future perfect temporal structure but also to the relations of speakers and hearers.”20 These “imperfections” are magnified in human rights contexts where there are often disputes concerning sovereignty and international legal jurisdiction or between conflicting human rights principles. Despite this continual process of deferral, legal claims are powerful, whether or not they are successful, according to Constable, in that “they appeal to a ‘law’ that they affirm as a speaker’s and hearer’s jointly owned law to demand the recognition that belongs to what they assert.”21 Here, too, I add the caveat that human rights legal disputes can hinge on the negotiation between parties of which legal principles apply and what the material referents of those principles are. Given that the law’s promise can only be realized in the form of future action, the law’s temporal dimensions must necessarily be extended from the linearity of precedent, the moment of a present judgment, or the timeless claim of universality to include the heterotemporal frameworks of speakers and hearers. The law becomes a prism

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Introduction  7 through which these heterotemporalities are negotiated, while at the same time the law—as a discourse—is subject to change through the pressures of these same negotiations. The other normative human rights discourses of reportage and of human rights and humanitarian appeals join the conversation through their own generic norms, and each chapter in this book examines a subset of these discourses in order to understand how their “technologies” (to borrow again from Grewal) produce specific human rights events and outcomes: subjects, causes, claims, and responses. These discourses formulate a “configuration of the common experience of the sensible,” in Jacques Rancière’s words, in that news accounts, human rights reporting, humanitarian appeals, and legal cases are the primary ways in which stories of violations enter the public sphere. In this sense, normative rights discourses generate what I refer to here as the social imaginary, which is not imaginary in opposition to the real, but rather calls upon the imagination to garner meaning and to imbue that meaning with passion and concern. Although these normative discourses speak to different audiences and call upon different forms of research (e.g., legal, medical, scientific) and argumentation, in many ways, they reinforce one another to define particular human rights violations and the subjects who perpetrate and bear them. Critiques of human rights as a mode of governance that re-produces the exclusionary logics of neoliberal capital accumulation and securitization point to the ways in which these definitions often replicate the ostensible bifurcation between the liberal subject of human rights and its other: the abject victim, or what Giorgio Agamben refers to as bare life. As opposed to unmasking the hegemonic operations of human rights or reading for resistance to those operations, this book seeks to dismantle the bifurcation of the liberal subject versus bare life through an analysis of the heterotemporalities and subject positions that emerge through and in relation to rights discourses. The social imaginary of human rights often produces its most powerful effects through the manufacture and circulation of images and discourses of suffering that are grounded in “the logic of cultural recognition”—those identity-based categories through which the liberal subject and its others are coded.22 This is the logic through which Sangdrol, for instance, becomes legible in particularly easily commodifiable categories as a legally immature or unqualified, religious, long-suffering, non-threatening, Third World female victim whose saving reconfirms the right-ness, the moral superiority of human rights governmentality. However, as I demonstrate throughout this book, reading closely and interdisciplinarily discloses that the subjects of human rights are never so easily recognizable and categorizable, nor are the discourses of human rights so univocal or all encompassing. Rather than seek to expand the range of identities recognizable within human rights frameworks, I focus on the discursive and material operations of human rights through which its subjects emerge. Thus, although there is no intrinsic, causal relationship between different discourses of human rights, this is

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8 Introduction book is indebted to Rancière’s argument that cultural production can powerfully shape the social imaginary and, crucially, can make its operations available to scrutiny. Although literature and visual culture can, of course, just as easily reproduce and intensify recognizable categories of identity, I am interested here in how fiction and visual culture can facilitate an analytical shift from identity to forms of subjectivity and legal personhood that might found other juridico–political claims. “Art,” in Rancière’s term, in its manifest tension between form and content, materiality, contemplation, and affect, can stage a “dissensus” in what is given—what is visible and what it means. He defines dissensus in terms of “an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all.”23 Dissensus does not refer, in other words, to the work of unmasking false claims or resistance against oppression from pre-existing positions. Instead, Rancière maps a different approach to dissensus that refers to those shifts in perspective, in the relationships between “things and meanings,”24 in what is imaginable that signals the emergence of new political subjects, discourses, and interpretations. Central to the staging of dissensus, he argues, is the work of “fiction”: that “re-framing of the ‘real,’ or the framing of a dissensus, [that] is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective.”25 Although I would not argue that aesthetic production always and necessarily works in these ways or that it is a privileged discourse for examining human rights, I find that the process of closely reading (as opposed to reading for some overt political argument) literary and visual culture in the context of other human rights discourses can reveal the operations of human rights’ technologies of governance as well as potential alternatives, in that “fiction” can disclose “that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification.”26 To that end, each chapter of this book brings conventional human rights discourses together with a constellation of visual and literary cultural texts in order to examine the normative subjects and times of human rights in five different contexts: the use of child soldiers in contemporary failed states; Zimbabwe’s post–independence targeting of civilian populations in the Gukurahundi of the mid–1980s and its legacy of political impunity; toxicity and spectacle after the Union Carbide explosion of 1984 in Bhopal, India; the medical humanitarian work of Médecins Sans Frontières in various locations from 1983 to the present; and the contemporary aftermath of Indonesia’s 1965–66 mass murders against Communists and suspected Communist sympathizers. Reading human rights as a broadly constructed discursive formation, with substantive and material effects, brings to the forefront the production of heterogeneous subjects and temporalities, both of which expand claims for justice. My analysis of how these varied texts

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Introduction  9 produce particular social imaginaries of a given human rights issue or event reveals at once the intrinsic heterogeneity of the social imaginary and, correspondingly, how the social imaginary might give rise to the political negotiation that Rancière describes in terms of dissensus. For Rancière, dissensus is precisely the interval or faultline in the social imaginary in which political subjectivization—the emergence of subject positions that alter the terms of the social imaginary or the given—occurs. I draw on Rancière’s theory of subjectivization because it so carefully articulates an alternative to identity-based approaches to rights that ultimately remain tied to the logics of bifurcation and exclusion. For Rancière, politics refers to the process that “makes visible that which had no reason to be seen,” and it is the realm that comes into being in concert with its subjects. In other words, a political subject does not refer to an a priori identity or the idealized figure of the liberal subject; rather it designates “the operator of a particular mode of [subjectivization …] through which politics has its existence.”27 The political subject, emerging through the process of subjectivization which dissensus makes possible, is therefore always contingently located at the nexus of differentiated perspectives and discourses. Reading at the nexus of these perspectives and discourses, then, yields the central claims of my argument. First, that reading for the heterotemporality of human rights events and discourses insists on justice as an open-ended, future-oriented process of negotiation that can incorporate intergenerational claims, varying scopes of suffering and responsibility, and is not bound to a singular definition of modern progress. Heterotemporality, in other words, demands the consideration of varying scales of the time and space, or chronotope, of atrocity. Moreover, human rights, their promises and failures notwithstanding, offer one among many approaches in the pursuit of justice, and my readings examine those contexts when human rights are efficacious, are pressed to become more capacious, or simply fail to meet the needs and desires of political subjects. Second, that the heterotemporality of human rights also makes visible a proliferation of human rights subjects and claims beyond the false division between the liberal subject and the victim. My readings aim to dismantle the logic of the liberal subject of rights, citizenship, and law versus bare life that can, following Agamben, be sacrificed without political consequence. The ideal of liberal subjectivity is only and “at best” differentially available to particular classes of persons, defined according to hierarchized categories of identity, and it depends upon a mind/body duality that denies the embodiment of the subject which human rights aim to address. Moreover, neither citizenship nor rights can make the body whole nor render the subject bounded and stable in meaning. The other pole of the binary opposition is similarly untenable. As Angela Naimou has clearly demonstrated in her deconstruction of Agamben’s theory, his conceptualization fails to acknowledge that “[w]hat lies between the ideal citizen and bare life is an enormous range of particular legal identities.”28 Building on Colin Dayan’s theories of negative legal personhood,

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10 Introduction Naimou emphasizes that that construction is neither singular nor devoid of political meaning. Rather, the law produces specific subject positions through which it distributes harm and precariousness: “[It] is not an absence of personhood or the failure of law to recognize personhood; rather, it is a form of personhood paradoxically constructed in the law as that which is negated or incapacitated by the law.”29 Because I am interested in the capacity (or lack thereof) of human rights to countenance and to respond to the subject’s embodied suffering and juridico–political standing, I turn to recent feminist theories of vulnerability and precarity to frame my analyses of subjectivization and human rights. These theories challenge some of the ideological foundations of human rights even as they seek to capture some of the promise of human rights. My readings reveal the paradoxical ways in which vulnerability theory can at once dislodge the liberal subject from the center of rights discourse, even as the theory risks reproducing debilitating narratives of victimhood. However, I also analyze cases wherein the sufferers of human rights abuses deploy their own vulnerabilities, in a process I refer to as self-precaritization, in order to initiate new, powerful human rights claims. Before examining in more detail the theories of vulnerability that inform this project, I want to return one last time to Sangdrol’s story in order to demonstrate the intrinsic politicization of bare life and to insist that these questions of representation, legal personhood, and subjectivity are not solely theoretical. Agamben describes the production of bare life—the state of abjection one step removed from death; the state of being of one who is devoid of value, who therefore cannot be sacrificed—as the “originary activity of sovereignty.”30 Sangdrol’s treatment in prison would seem to exemplify that condition. Physically diminutive, young, and female, surviving years of brutal torture when many did not, Sangdrol was subject to the death-world, in Agamben’s terms, created by the sovereign will of the state. To give but one of many possible examples, regarding a beating for allegedly instigating a disturbance during a visit by a European Union delegation, one of Sangdrol’s cellmates testified: Ani Sangdrol was in the worst condition. It was like she was dead, she had lost consciousness. They didn’t have any proof against Ani-la, they beat her out of a grudge. Ani Sangdrol couldn’t stand up. [They] said “Rigchog, stand up,” but she could not. Rigchog is what they call Sangdrol. We thought that she was dead, and so did the tutrang [chief female prison official of that unit], who said, “Don’t hit [her].” Then Pema Butri [the nuns’ notorious female guard] came forward and struck [her] again with her belt. [Sangdrol] suddenly regained consciousness, and Pema Butri said, “I thought you had died, but you still didn’t die. You! Stand up!” We [were forbidden] to move. We had to wait a long time for her to stand up. When she did she was bleeding heavily, blood was streaming from her like water. […] They had

Introduction  11

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trampled upon her body. There were so many people beating [her] that we couldn’t see her when she had fallen down. She wasn’t even able to lift up her head afterwards.31 And yet … the human rights report on the operations of her cellblock, Rukhag 3, details Sangdrol and other prisoners’ many ostensible i­nfractions—each garnering additional physical punishments—such as an untidy bed, refusing to stand when a prison official entered the cell, refusing to sing a patriotic propaganda song, and of course the recording of their own songs as well. Each was received as a form of political protest and, as the sentencing document cited above notes, “their attitude toward confession was abominable.” Sangdrol and her cellmates adamantly protested their conditions and the attempts at indoctrination; however, I want to avoid reading her political subjectivization solely in terms of resistance—the kind of reading of resistance as agency that unwittingly calls forth the liberal subject as its protagonist. Throughout their time in prison, the nuns clearly tried to aid one another whenever possible. During one particularly vicious beating, for example, a cellmate threw herself over Sangdrol to protect her from further blows, and Sangdrol attributes her survival in large measure to the women’s solidarity and care. In this sense, their mutual care to stay alive stages dissensus simply by refusing the totalizing power of sovereignty, building collective networks of care that remake that refusal into the stuff of survival. More generally, prisoners of conscience constitute a challenge to state sovereignty precisely by speaking out against it. In his careful analysis of political prisoners’ parrhesia, or fearless speech, Gerard Hauser analyzes how, by refusing to ask permission to speak, and by their willingness to risk death in doing so, prisoners of conscience “precipitat[e] a crisis: [their speech] raises the possibility of defying the state’s sovereign capacity to decree the homo sacer and thereby reduce the citizen to bare life. [… It] disrupts the biopolitical equation of sovereignty, exposes the limits of state power, and asserts that sovereignty can be challenged and possibly redefined.”32 Sangdrol’s public protests at age thirteen and fifteen offered this challenge, but what happens once inside the prison, where torture and abuse provide the ideological and material manifestation of the state’s violent sovereignty? Hauser analyzes the vernacular speech and practices of political prisoners who assert human rights claims without human rights normative discourses and, in doing so, produce a “searing critique of the sovereign’s power.”33 What he calls the moral vernacular includes overt protests in prison as well as the many different quotidian ways in which prisoners express their political agency. For Hauser, Sangdrol’s examples above, from the refusal to stand for a visiting official to the protest song to the nuns’ attempt to keep one another alive through acts of “ordinary virtues,” are all constitutive of the vernacular of human rights and political resistance of prisoners of conscience.34 There is also another factor at work here, however, that locates dissensus outside of a conventional search for the subject’s agency. This other

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12 Introduction dimension of politicization becomes visible through the testimony above when the tutrang tells the guard, “Don’t hit [her],” either in fear that another blow would kill Sangdrol or that it would constitute some kind of excess or defilement. But why the restraint? “Don’t hit [her]” reveals the paradox at the heart of Rukhag 3 and in the theory of the state of exception and bare life more broadly. In that moment, the command to cease a violent performance that is routinely enacted, even if violated by Pema Butri’s next blow, reveals the kind of brief interval Rancière describes in which ideology fractures. On the one hand, the beatings and other forms of abuse have been systematized. It is possible to trace their patterns and practices in the context of prison leadership and daily events, the country’s legal codes, and the reactions of the prisoners. The beatings demonstrated the state’s control over Sangdrol’s death-world by reducing her to a seemingly lifeless body, perhaps available politically only for mourning by her compatriots; however, in attempting to stay the next blow, the death-blow, the prison chief also seems to recognize that Sangdrol’s bare life and her death, if it were at that moment, both carry political meaning: alive and resistant, Sangdrol engages in an ideological contest in which the state attempts to convert her. However, her death in those circumstances would mean that the contest has ended and the state has lost. Thus, the careful calibration by even sadistic prison guards and officials of how to keep the prisoner alive yet without speech reveals the intrinsic political subjectivization of bare life and, with it, the limits of sovereignty. “Stand up!” Pema Butri commands, in order to begin the contest again. Her command signifies paradoxically the limits of her power. The state demonstrates its capacity to reduce the citizen to bare life; however, that bare life is never without political significance because the prisoner has already spoken out, and that speech extends the time of political subjectivization into the future, even if its expression goes on to take different forms that may or may not figure as “resistance.” On occasion, when addressing the cause of prisoner abuse and Tibetan autonomy, Sangdrol will sing one of the Drapchi 14 songs to a public audience. Although she sings as a citizen and an activist, those appellations cannot convey her complex negotiation of security and loss of homeland and family, resiliency, and the lasting effects of torture, the precarity of life in the US, or the difficulty of having endured so much for a political goal that seems so far away. Sangdrol sings on behalf of justice yet undone, in words her non-Tibetan speaking audiences will not understand, and it is that powerful and moving voice that I try to understand by looking beyond both the victim and the liberal subject to the vulnerable subject of human rights.

The Vulnerable Subject of Human Rights As many theorists, historians, and philosophers have shown, the liberal subject as the ideal bearer of human rights makes visible the gap between legal personhood (the sovereign subject who is invested with legal standing as a

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Introduction  13 form of property) and the human being (species member). Whereas human rights are ostensibly inherent in the embodied human being, according to the UDHR, rights can only exist in relation to the person before law in actual legal cases. As Jens David Ohlin demonstrates in “Is the Concept of the Person Necessary for Human Rights?” an entity is “a person because we ascribe human rights to it,” not the other way around.35 Normative human rights thus accomplish a sleight of hand that erases embodiment at the moment of its supposed protection. This is the logic of dis-embodied legal personhood that subtends corporate free speech in the form of political campaign contributions in decisions such as Citizens United v. Federal ­ lections ­Commission (2010) or the successful efforts of John Kamm to E trade prisoners as commodities among sovereign states. The gap between legal personhood and the human being that the liberal subject fails to bridge has two particularly damaging effects that concern this project: it makes possible the de-coupling of human rights from human embodiment or, conversely, the distribution of rights (and therefore production of the legal persons who bear them) according to hierarchies of a priori identities. Elizabeth Anker provides a formidable critique of liberalism for its production at once of the claim to universality as well as of persons’ unequal standing before the law. She summarizes that within the liberal tradition of human rights, “[T]he body is generally idealized through the invention of its integrity, reduced to calculations of identity and likeness, or treated as a mere nuisance.”36 Although I pursue a different line of argument than Anker does, I take her critique as a point of departure, adding to it a critique of the narrative of modern progress that is also implicit in the liberal subject’s historical trajectory and that delimits what counts as justice accordingly. Anker draws on phenomenology, through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in order to restore considerations of embodiment and ­ embodied suffering to the otherwise anemic conceptualization of the liberal subject. Phenomenology for Anker offers a response to liberalism’s failure to “register the manifold and dense energies that compose corporeal experience, denying how they together actuate human selfhood, facilitate judgment and decision making, enliven collective life, and purvey multifaceted kinds of meaning.”37 She turns to literary fiction to explore the imagination of these energies and their effects. Thus, she reads for the ways in which authors reinvigorate human rights through a more capacious imagination of the embodied, phenomenological experience of the subject who bears them. My insistence on embodiment as a central condition of the human rights subject comes not from perceptive faculties but, instead, from the social imaginary—the production of particularly embodied subjects whose meanings derive from, though are not wholly constrained by, the contexts in which they arise. To consider embodiment as constitutive of subjectivity, while maintaining a distinction between embodiment and fixed bodily or cultural identification, I take as a starting point the idea that the subject is always variously

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14 Introduction constituted within a matrix of norms, rather than in binary opposition to the Other. To do so, I draw at times on rhetorical approaches to a human rights event that illuminate contextualized forms of recognition; however, I  am interested predominantly in the imaginative grounding of the event and the effects outside of fixed identities, that the social imaginary might generate. Wendy Hesford develops a rhetorical approach to this problem in Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms and some of her subsequent essays. Hesford calls into question “the normative frameworks that govern subject formation and the scenes of suffering, as well as the recognition scenes in human rights discourse.”38 As her emphasis on recognition and the scenes of suffering indicates, her focus is on the ways in which human rights discourses operate forcefully and often problematically through identificatory processes. These processes depend upon and reinforce conventional categories (e.g., what Teju Cole has described recently as the white-savior industrial complex).39 As Hesford details through her analysis of the Hegelian master–slave relationship that informs models of subjectivity and identification predicated on the opposition of self and other, such a model depends upon the “attributes of recognition [that] reinforce[e] the very identity categories that human rights claims contest.”40 Rancière makes a related, if more abstract, argument in his critique of Hannah Arendt and Agamben’s theories of the opposition between political and bare life. For both Hesford and Rancière, those binary oppositions do not hold up to scrutiny, even though they powerfully affect the distributions of human rights and the recognition of their bearers. The politics of recognition that operate through identity categories facilitate the slide from human rights claims to humanitarian gestures, from the politics of the sufferer to the generosity of the spectator. That slide both depoliticizes and devalues human rights, as those who have rights have them precisely because they do not need them. As Rancière writes pointedly, within such a model rights “seem to be of no use. And when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights.”41 Whereas Rancière argues for dissensus as the mode of reading that can disrupt those conventions, Hesford takes a rhetorical approach (as does Hauser with respect to prisoners of conscience) to analyze representations of human rights in visual culture for the ways in which they reproduce or offer alternatives to conventional patterns of recognition and identification, particularly in relation to the familiar figures of the victim and agent.42 Her readings of visual culture in terms of contextualized rhetorical events makes possible her significant expansion of what it means to witness, in order to “move beyond recognition in human rights discourse”43 and to consider that discourse’s other, more capacious operations. I share these calls for attending to the embodiment of the human rights subject and the need to read contextually for the political subjectivization

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Introduction  15 of heterogeneous subjects; however, I advance these arguments in other directions. I turn to feminist theories of vulnerability and precarity for their explicit attempts to formulate an alternative to the liberal subject of human rights, an understanding of subjectivity as always, necessarily, humanly and materially embodied as well as “embedded,” to borrow from Anna Grear, in a social matrix. Although vulnerability theory is a broad field, three particular strands of it have crucial bearing on my project: legal theories of vulnerability developed by Martha Albert Fineman and Anna Grear, Judith Butler’s philosophical approach to precarious life, and Isabell Lorey’s careful categorization as a political scientist of different forms of precarity. My goal is not to assert an argument for a vulnerability approach to human rights so much as to examine the ways in which the theorization of vulnerable and precarious subjects can open up human rights discourses to new forms of political subjectivization and their negotiation of new futures. For Fineman, founder and director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project as well as Emory University Law’s Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, vulnerability theory began as a “stealthily disguised human rights discourse”44 in a US context, although she has since shifted to focus on the necessary resources to foster human resilience rather than rights. As opposed to an approach to frame a subject’s claims against an abusive state, Fineman’s goal is to provide the legal lineaments of a more responsive state. In an essay that condenses much of her foundational ­writing on the vulnerable subject of the law, she defines vulnerability in terms of the human conditions of corporeality and sociality that necessitate interdependency. Vulnerability is embodied and imminent, yet differentiated and particular, and it illuminates and calls for various forms of social interdependence. Seeking to counteract the tendency for valuing the care that attends biological dependency (in infancy and old age, for example) and stigmatizing other forms of dependency (as a failure of personal responsibility), Fineman defines “derivative dependency” to underscore the ways in which interdependency is at once “dependent on resources” and “socially imposed.”45 Her vulnerability thesis shifts responsibility for derivative dependency from the individual who chooses to care for others (and thus bears sole responsibility and costs for that choice) to the state and the institutions it regulates and shapes. The vulnerable subject therefore demands a “‘responsive state’—a state that recognizes that it and the institutions it brings into being through law are the means and mechanisms whereby individuals accumulate the resilience or resources that they need to confront the social, material, and practical implications of vulnerability.”46 Although Fineman’s emphasis on resilience refocuses attention on the subject’s capacities as opposed to the state’s duties, the language of derivative dependency also calls to mind the history of the concept in rationalizations of colonial power (as Judith Butler also points out with reference to Albert Memmi’s Dependency47). More generally, critics of a vulnerability approach underscore how its language, only exacerbated by the coupling of vulnerability and dependency, facilitates paternalizing,

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16 Introduction imperializing, and securitizing modes of governmentality. Kate Brown goes so far as to argue that “far from being innocuous, the concept of ‘vulnerability’ is so loaded with political, moral, and practical implications that it is potentially damaging to the pursuit of social justice.”48 Both Gregory B ­ ankoff and Rebecca Dingo also point to the ways in which the designations of vulnerable populations can be “transcoded,” as Dingo writes, to serve the ends of sovereign power.49 These dangers are compounded by calls for a responsive state, unless they are accompanied by a deep interrogation of how states function in predatory as well as supportive ways in relation to the subjects they regulate. Notwithstanding these significant concerns, I find in Fineman’s approach a careful attempt to rethink vulnerable populations apart from identity categories. She notes that vulnerable populations defined according to specific identities have three troubling implications: first, such definitions imply that there are other identities that are invulnerable, thereby stigmatizing vulnerability; second, they mask differentiations within identity groups; and third, “[i]dentity categories have become proxies for problems such as poverty or the failure of public educational systems.”50 Vulnerability theory is founded on the recognition of vulnerability as a shared condition, thereby erasing its stigma and shifting the focus to its biopolitical and geopolitical distribution. Whereas her approach as I understand it provides an argument for a strong social welfare state, it does little to inform political responses to state-­sponsored human rights abuses except to say they are unethical. In addition, she pays little attention to biopolitical power in all of its dimensions, instead recoding biopolitical governmentality in potentially positive terms. Her argument raises the crucial question that Lauren Berlant poses of what it might mean to shift a discussion of human rights from “an idiom of power to an idiom of care as grounds for what needs to change to better suture the social.”51 Although the rationale for the shift is predicated on re-conceptualizing human shared vulnerability and intercorporeality, as opposed to autonomy, it nonetheless works in parallel to the shift from human rights to humanitarianism that Rancière critiques for evacuating politics at the moment it becomes necessary. My turn to vulnerability approaches to human rights is motivated by the desire to think through how they might formulate alternatives as well as how they risk re-instantiating the victim as the liberal subject of egregious wrongs. How can political subjectivization emerge through vulnerability as opposed to in opposition to vulnerability? Anna Grear has provided some of the most careful thinking about how the vulnerable subject is always already at the center of normative human rights and, therefore, in need of a reoriented rights discourse that acknowledges its subject. In doing so, she foregrounds conditions of advanced corporate capitalism and its effects on political and legal subjectivity, thereby re-opening space for recognition of the political agency of vulnerable, living subjects (although Slaughter points out that the corporatization of human rights is an integral part of their

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Introduction  17 history, rather than a new development). For Grear, the rich potential of vulnerability theory for international human rights is as a response to the fiction of legal personhood grounded in liberal subjectivity, and she reads the articles of the UDHR for the ways in which they presuppose a subject who is inherently vulnerable precisely because of the physical and material conditions of corporeal and social existence.52 Grear takes as her starting point the material, embodied subject, underscoring (like Anker) the subject’s phenomenological experience and physical and social porosity to the conditions of existence, including the subject’s interrelationships with others. Locating the vulnerable in opposition to the liberal subject at the heart of human rights also expands rights norms to address transpecies claims to “co-flourishing” and against “co-symptomatic injustices,” which she defines as a kind of dysfunctional relationality that “highlights the perverse dynamics and capitalist etiology of the radical and immanent unevenness now affecting populations of embodied vulnerable bodies.”53 Although I am less interested in recovering the phenomenology of the subject than understanding how it functions in the social imaginary, I find key aspects of Grear’s conceptual apparatus crucial to thinking through vulnerability in a way that resists the collapse into victimhood. Among these is her insistence that discussions of the vulnerable subject always consider the specific, individuated ways in which subjectivity is embodied and embedded (located contextually in a socio–political matrix) as well as her notion of co-flourishing. Although co-flourishing might include a legal judgment or redistributive justice, it emphasizes the relationality of subjects as they negotiate a shared future. The focus on embodied and embedded subjectivity and co-flourishing offers important interventions to address the liabilities of liberal subjectivity. Among them, that the mind/body duality of the liberal subject is untenable in that embodiment highlights “that a radical interrelationality both inaugurates and constitutes our existence in a multitude of rich ways, at the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ levels,” and that interrelationality is contingent and mutable.54 Also, Grear’s formulation of the subject reads vulnerability as constitutive (neither positive, nor negative), as opposed to as an aberration to the subject’s ideal, inviolable, autonomous existence. This is a kind of non-teleological universality or universality in reverse: the vulnerable subject is only universal in the sense that the conditions of its vulnerability are always specific to a given historical, social, and geopolitical context. Not only does Grear want to revalue vulnerability as that which makes human beings susceptible to illness and harm as well as passions and desires, or, in sum, social beings, but her approach also eliminates the liberal subject (traditionally citizened, propertied, literate, white, and male) as the ideal toward which human rights lean. In its place, she posits flourishing and co-flourishing as goals, which would demand political negotiation across, I would argue, a heterotemporal framework. In an important extension of Fineman’s argument, Grear locates these goals, and the ethical responsibility

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18 Introduction and responsivity that attend them, not just in the state, but also among “all those co-symptomatically advantaged by the globalised context.”55 This argument points toward the need for theorizing coalition-building and alliances on behalf of co-flourishing that lie outside the nation–state and transnational structure of normative human rights institutions—with continued emphasis on the national sovereignties being linked. It suggests the need for attention to analogous structures of harm and violation in the context of the specific range of subject positions to which they each give rise. Although not yet fully articulated, this dimension of her argument calls for political solidarities that can mediate between individuated lived experiences of co-symptomatic injustice and the means and negotiated ends of distributive justice. Much of the theoretical work that addresses structural injustice takes up the language of precarity as opposed to vulnerability. If vulnerability is constitutive (albeit differentiated and contingent), precarity points to the biopolitical and geopolitical distributions of risk and dispossession. My analysis depends upon both terms in that they foreground two distinct but interrelated dimensions of human rights. In her theoretical and philosophical approach, Judith Butler analyzes precariousness, although she shares with Grear a definition of the subject in terms of the twinned factors of its material embodiment (which Butler reads primarily in terms of one’s exposure to suffering and grief) and sociality. Initially writing in response to the violence of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the so-called War on Terror, and the global recession of 2008, Butler foregrounds grievability as the “presupposition for the life that matters.”56 In order to examine how life is inherently yet differentially precarious, Butler analyzes which lives are grievable, the frames that render them legible as such, and the corresponding distribution of mourning for those lives. These analyses expose the biopolitical production of grievability that renders life differentially valuable and thus expendable. However, Butler curiously returns again and again in Precarious Life to the image of the newborn infant to signify the “condition of primary vulnerability.”57 There is, then, a tension in the work between her analysis of the bio- and geopolitical production of precarious life and her consideration of the solitary newborn, whose magical appearance seems to make sense only in reference to an originary separation between bare life and social, political life. The essays that comprise Precarious Life ground her analysis in Levinasian ethics and theories of sovereignty and governmentality. From Levinas, Butler derives a foundational ethical obligation that is grounded in the relationship between the self and the Other (configured by Levinas through the trope of the face); it is a relationship that exists a priori context and identification and that becomes recognizable (at which point it would become individuated and politicized) in the discursive situation, in that “language arrives as an address we do not will.”58 The face or the address thus becomes key to the ethical process of humanization, and Butler reads the discourses surrounding those targeted in the War on Terror, for

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Introduction  19 example, for the ways in which “the face is, in every instance, defaced, and that this is one of the representational and philosophical consequences of war itself.”59 Butler finds a parallel production of the bifurcation of the subject and its radical other in her analyses of Guantánamo Bay in the context of Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the state of exception. In her reading of the Guantánamo detainees as evidence of the “reanimation of sovereignty in cases of indefinite detention and the military tribunals,”60 she notes that the synchronized forces of sovereignty and governmentality that produce the detainees as inhabitants of bare life also threaten to extend the state of exception indefinitely and unto others. Frames of War expands her initial argument to include a deeper consideration of temporalities of grief—of the ways grievability also references the imagination of the future in the mourning of life that should have been lived longer or at all.61 In both works, Butler issues a passionate call for the role of cultural criticism in recognizing the humanity of those placed outside the frame of grievability—a goal my project shares. However, this call also raises concern because of the way it is formulated. Butler’s precarious subjects seem too easily divisible into those who grieve and can be grieved and those who are or are not grievable; those already political subjects and those like the detainee, the unmourned, and the abandoned newborn who only register as bare life, if they register at all within what is visible. In addition, although Butler’s attention to grievability provided a powerful intervention into the patriotic nationalism of post–9/11 US discourse (in the particular historical moment of her books’ releases), it also coded precarity and vulnerability predominantly in terms of suffering and injurability. Indeed, the difference between grievable and grieving life, on the one hand, and bare life, on the other, seems to lie in the space between social and purely physical life— wherein precarity is “that politically-induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death”62 and vulnerability is signified by the newborn. This is precisely the bifurcation I seek to undo both because of its elision of all that lies between those poles and because it figures bare life as universally apolitical. In her extensive review of the philosophical dimensions of vulnerability, Erinn Gilson likewise argues that vulnerability as a critical concept is hampered politically by its association with weakness, lack, passivity, and injury63 (those characteristics that transform vulnerable subjects into victims)—all of which seem to point to the possibility of their opposites: strength, coherence and completion, inviolability, and agency. Gilson finds in Butler’s work a nuanced discussion of the relationship between vulnerability and social norms as well as of the differentiations of precarity; however, Gilson poses the question of “whether vulnerability can be an ethical resource if there is a privileged relationship between vulnerability and violence. If vulnerability is always bound up with violence, as it seems to be in Butler’s work, can we conceive of vulnerability apart from

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20 Introduction violence?”64 If, in other words, there were an intrinsic link between vulnerability and violence, then the response would presumably be conditioned primarily by fear, anger, or avoidance. Moya Lloyd offers a related critique in questioning the “ontological assumptions that ground [Butler’s] ethics,” assumptions which obscure the relationship between ethics and politics.65 Lloyd notes that in Butler’s turn to Levinas, she moves from his apolitical grounding of the ethical encounter in the abstraction of the face (without identity and without will) to the specific, politicized readings of faces in the images of the other from the War on Terror. Together Gilson’s and Lloyd’s critiques also raise the question of whether subjectivity and selfhood arise from an inherently contestational, antagonistic relationship to the Other in Butler’s thinking. More recently, in “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” Butler emphasizes the social and relational dimensions of precarity in order to address how precarity can be mobilized politically. Moving from the focus on mourning and grievability in Precarious Life and Frames of War, the more recent essay emphasizes vulnerability as “a mode of relationality” that necessitates dependency.66 Whereas Fineman locates her analysis of derivative dependency in the institutions, including the family, produced and regulated through governmentality, Butler maintains a focus on the individual subject by referencing one’s biological dependency during infancy and old age. To move from corporeal vulnerability and dependency to politics means that politics must take as its aim the “infrastructural conditions for human action.”67 Here she outlines a foundational challenge of vulnerability for a feminist politics. Although one form of feminist action seeks legal and state protection for specific vulnerable populations, such initiatives, as Fineman also discusses, may implicitly strengthen the association of a given group as inherently (rather than structurally) vulnerable, and, thus, in need of paternalistic care as opposed to rights. Butler defines the problem as follows: “how to make the feminist claim effectively that such institutions are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that re-instate and naturalize relations of ­inequality.”68 ­Vulnerability, she notes, “works in two ways, to target a population and to protect it.”69 Making feminist claims effectively thus necessitates the constant vigilance of how theories of vulnerability might reinforce notions of victimhood and careful attention to vulnerability as a political effect as opposed to a biological condition tied to identity, and such claims implicitly argue against the “juridification of the feminist project”—the idea that only law can determine its goals, successes, and failures—and instead recognize heterogeneous and “extra-legal” forms of political engagement.70 Isabell Lorey builds upon Butler’s work in Frames of War in order to differentiate the ways in which vulnerability and precarity manifest in the political. Lorey distinguishes three dimensions of precariousness that might be summarized as “insecurity and vulnerability, destabilization, and endangerment.”71 Although she is not writing about human rights in particular, her

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Introduction  21 schema provides a helpful mapping of human rights’ various effects, including as an instrument of domination. For Lorey, precariousness refers to a common corporeal vulnerability that is “always relational” and “involves an ineluctable endangerment of bodies that cannot be prevented, not only because they are mortal, but also specifically because they are social.” In this conceptualization, the vulnerable and materially embodied subject’s meaning is garnered through its “socio-ontological” positioning. That positioning, in turn, is linked to her second term, precarity (destabilization) as “a category of order”—it is the “hierarchization of ‘being-with’, which accompanies processes of Othering,” and it is a differentiated product of “political and legal regulations that are specifically supposed to protect against general, existential precariousness.” These effects are visible in the gap between the liberal subject and the human being, discussed above, that human rights attempt to suture. The failure of that suture—the heterogeneous forms of both positive and negative legal personhood that the law generates, as well as hierarchies according to “body” and “culture”—evidence how liberal governmentality designed to safeguard the subject produces different categories of legal subjectivity. Finally, she uses governmental precarization (endangerment) to denote “destabilization through wage labor, but also a destabilization of ways of living and hence bodies.”72 These distinctions are crucial to Lorey’s two-fold argument that, first, governmental precarization is distinct from the kind of inequalities produced by precarity (e.g., through the conceptual apparatus of human rights) and, second and most crucially, that precarization has become normalized within governmentality: “Precarious living and working conditions are currently being normalized at a structural level and have thus become a fundamental instrument of governing.”73 This feature of precarious life arises in the mobilization of human rights in service of the securitization of state and corporate interests at the expense of specific populations. Although she presents her conceptual logic in conversation with Butler’s, Lorey’s focus on governmentality as opposed to subjectivity along with her differentiations of vulnerability and precarity contribute to my understanding of human rights as at once a discourse and part of a mode of biopolitical and geopolitical governmentality that functions in concert with neoliberal and securitization objectives. Without replicating the logic of binary opposition between politics and bare life or self and Other, her approach makes visible a more complex imbrication of vulnerability and security than may first appear. For instance, in the UDHR, Article 3 guarantees that “[e]veryone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” The rhetorical force of life and liberty echoes the US Declaration of Independence; however, the inclusion of security incorporates other histories. In her analysis of the UDHR, Grear, following Johannes Morsink’s analysis, reads the document as a whole as a response to the atrocities of the Nazi holocaust and Article 3 in particular in terms of “Nazi practices, including euthanasia […] and the deprivation of liberty under Nazi law.”74 Mary Ann Glendon’s historical

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22 Introduction account of the drafting emphasizes instead the six days of debate in the Third Committee of the General Assembly over whether or not Article 3 should include an amendment proposed by the Soviet Union to ban capital punishment.75 In both cases, security is tied to the protection of life from the political forces that would end it, thereby coupling security and vulnerability in the logic of rights and positioning universal human rights above the laws of the state. Although the inclusion of liberty may stem from Nazi law as Grear indicates, Lorey’s analytical framework also illuminates other effects of that coupling. As discussed above, the combination of freedom and security, particularly when freedom is equated with a consumerist notion of choice, facilitates a mode of self-regulation that is crucial to the function of the liberal state and capital accumulation. In the current neoliberal context, however, Lorey argues that this relationship shifts, and “freedom and insecurity form the new couple of neoliberal governmentality: freedom is not principally limited by the state, the state does not principally fight against insecurity, but rather both become the ideological precondition for governmental precarization.”76 In other words, as neoliberalism works to privatize risk and opportunity, freedom and insecurity are likewise seen as private responsibilities, even though they are differentially available and distributed through modes of governmentality in which precarization has become normalized. One example of this trend might be the argument in favor of the US government’s surveillance of private phone records, even as metadata, because only those who have done something “wrong” have cause for concern. This trend is also evident in the explosion of global security studies, the privatization of security networks (and the private-public human-security partnerships Paul Amar details in The Security Archipelago), and the relatively new field of biosecurity. As the Comaroffs argue in relation to the designation of HIV/ AIDS as a security issue, biosecurity studies produce “new kinds of political subjectivity and sociality in the emergence of new patterns of integration, exclusion, prosperity, and immiseration on an ever more planetary scale.”77 The imbrication of freedom and insecurity within the governmental production and distribution of precarity leads me to one additional goal of this project: to de-couple vulnerability and security in human rights discourses. Within normative human rights, vulnerability and security as opposites that are nonetheless bound together reproduces the dichotomy between the victim and the liberal subject-as-citizen, as well as the teleological narrative of human rights. To consider alternatives to this formulation that speak to heterogeneous subjects and temporalities of human rights, I read for an open-ended range of viable, livable responses to the combinatory effects of vulnerability and endangerment that define them. The suffering of egregious wrongs yields diverse, complex, and sometimes contradictory, affective, political, and epistemic effects, not all of which demand security and securitization as a response. In other words, the project of separating vulnerability from victimhood requires an understanding of politics as “not a sphere, but

Introduction  23 a process”78 whose path toward justice cannot be pre-determined but must be negotiated by the political subjects who undertake it.

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Terminology and Structure Throughout this book, I retain the terms vulnerability and precarity or precaritization in order to call upon specific aspects of their complicated theoretical roots. Vulnerability pertains foremost to the subject who is always and already materially and humanly embodied; socially and relationally embedded; and contingently located in geo-spatial and heterotemporal contexts. In a discussion of human rights, vulnerability—as opposed to Lorey’s use of precariousness and precarity—retains the sense of embodied suffering that is crucial to restoring corporeal existence to the subject of human rights. Vulnerability also more clearly references the limitations of the theory that informs this project: the ways in which human rights seem to require the production of victims in order, paradoxically, to found a claim. Finally, I hope the use of vulnerability continually reminds the reader that human rights discourses are always susceptible to and often constitutive of operations that target populations for harm as well as for legal redress and aid. I use the terms precarity and precaritization in reference to the differential targeting and distribution of risk and harm through neoliberal and securitized governmentality, whether undertaken by states, a transnational network of human rights actors, or other human–security networks. Chapter one begins with the building blocks of conventional human rights: the liberal subject, the nation-state, and the UN-sponsored framework of human rights. I look at the child soldier as a paradigmatic, if paradoxical, human rights subject, who is at once victim and perpetrator, in fiction of contemporary Nigerian authors Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani and in relation to international human rights law. Whereas the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its Optional Protocol enshrine a particular vision of an ideal childhood which the law seeks to recuperate after atrocity, child soldiers represented as specters—and, in Butler’s sense, as “spectrally human”—in the novels underscore the limitations of the law and of the vision of childhood it codifies, without disavowing the protections the law affords. As opposed to reading the child soldier solely as a vulnerable subject to be rescued (a conclusion that makes vulnerability complicit with victimization, while simultaneously eliding the claims of those harmed by child soldiers), I examine how child soldiers are at once produced by and themselves produce conditions of vulnerability that exceed the law’s capacity to respond. The anachronistic claims on the reader by the protagonists that haunt these novels also traverse normative frames around the time and space of justice. Haunting occurs within the temporal entanglements that Achille Mbembe argues define postcolonial sites, and which are reflected in the constellation of discourses brought into conversation in this chapter. Although the theoretical emphasis upon haunting might appear

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24 Introduction to elide the question of embodiment, I show that it is precisely the work of the texts to link their subjects’ troubling lingering, even unto and after death, to larger conditions of embodied vulnerability and material existence. Although Iweala attempts to imagine the embodied experience of a fictional child soldier as an alternative to the abstract subject of the law, the logic of the novel’s form ultimately reinforces the psycho–social model of redress presented in the CRC. Abani’s novella is a riskier text in formal and aesthetic terms, and those risks point to the limits of the prevailing fiction of legal personhood as well as the challenge of political subjectivization that might found an alternative. Chapter two focuses on human rights reporting and fiction of ­Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi, the state-sponsored intranational violence of 1983–1987, just after Zimbabwe achieved independence and black majority rule. Reading the human rights report on the atrocities together with three contemporary novels, Chenjerai Hove’s Shadows, James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now, and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins, I examine how these different human rights genres—reportage and fiction—define precarious communities and vulnerable subjects; and I analyze their efforts to link precarity to political community. The official rhetoric features a narrative of necessary civilian sacrifices on behalf of national security that is in keeping with Mugabe’s linear, patriarchal, nationalist historiography and autocratic rule. Through a deconstructive reading of the archive and the process of archivization, I argue that the human rights report, Breaking the Silence/ Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, seeks, first, to define a precarious community that was victim to predations of the state and deserves legal standing and, second, to contribute to a counter history of Mugabe’s long rule. The novels similarly disturb the archive, but to different ends. Whereas Hove’s ­Shadows gives voice to imagined victims of the violence (substituting the data of the human rights report with characterization of a largely depoliticized community), Kilgore focuses on the political necessity of a counter history. Vera’s novel critiques the gendered building blocks of Mugabe’s nationalism and gestures toward an open-ended, heterogeneous future of belonging and co-flourishing that lies outside of the language of human rights. The figure of the historian in Kilgore’s and Vera’s novels, in particular, demonstrate the authors’ careful consideration of historiography as well as the stories that cannot be told through its conventions. Chapters three and four move my readings historically and geographically from newly postcolonial contexts to the globalization of capital and humanitarianism from the 1980s to the present. Chapter three analyzes competing discourses of toxicity, victimhood, and personhood that inform representations of the Bhopal Union Carbide explosion in 1984 and the ongoing advocacy efforts that have followed. After providing some of the legal, political, and historical context for both the Union Carbide plant and catastrophe (contexts that invoke varying temporal and spatial scales of representation and responsibility), I turn to Raghu Rai’s photograph of the

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Introduction  25 Bhopali child’s burial for how it epitomizes the dominant narrative of distant and random suffering that circulates especially in international media. Mediatized and journalistic portrayals of the catastrophe continue to shape its meanings, and the fiction I address in this chapter implicitly acknowledges that importance through the use of journalist characters and reference to Rai’s photograph. Rai’s photography yields the overexposed, spectacularized image of a pure victim; however, it also raises the question of how even such an image can generate a multiplicity of discursive interventions into that same dominant narrative. The photograph provides a link among three literary fictions of Bhopal: Meaghan Delahunt’s The Red Book, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Mahasweta Devi’s novella Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. I analyze each of these texts for how they construct distinct “civic epistemologies” (Sheila Jasanoff) of Bhopal—those modes of understanding the disaster that arise from its social imaginary as well as from the various forms of expertise that inform the political, economic, and medical responses to it. Although claims for continuing liability for the toxic effects of the explosion itself and its intergenerational environmental impact foreground competing circles of responsibility, I attend, too, to the ways in which these debates are scripted through gendered bodies and modes of identification as opposed to particular subject positions. And I conclude with a brief discussion of the role of gas-affected women activists in Bhopal, whom the fictions, perhaps not surprisingly, exclude. Chapter four analyzes the ways in which Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) understands its work through the concepts of humanitarian space and témoignage (witnessing as a form of advocacy) in order to expose the impossibility of conceptualizing representations of bare life outside a complex political sphere. Whereas Agamben argues that sovereignty produces bare life and citizenship, I demonstrate that even in depictions of egregious suffering that results from state violence, heterogeneous subject positions are visible. I analyze these depictions through re-purposed photo/graphic narratives of MSF projects from 1984 to 2005. Although originally developed to generate fundraising and witnessing appeals and to accompany journalistic accounts of particular human rights events, images by Sebastião Salgado (The Sahel: The End of the Road), Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, James Nachtwey (Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Didier Lefèvre (The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders) address broader audiences and deliver more complex representations as they are transformed into photo/graphic narrative books. Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles, whose cartoon–style graphic narrative is far removed from documentary realism, provides the clearest window into MSF’s process of self-critique in negotiating the medical and political demands of its work. By redistributing what is seen and what is given, in Rancière’s sense, the visual depiction of vulnerability in each of these texts each opens up the field of political subjectivization to new

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26 Introduction subjects and invites considerations of the political that stand apart from conventional notions of agency. Whereas Chapters one through four consider literature and visual culture in relation to normative human rights discourses that include legal conventions, human rights reports, and journalism, my project concludes by taking up the relationship between film and the official discourse of silence that often surrounds atrocity committed by the state upon its inhabitants— atrocity that is decades-old but contemporarily resonant. In Chapter five, I develop the critical concept of vertigo as another alternative to the aesthetics of identification in the context of Joshua Oppenheimer’s two films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). The non-fiction films do not conform to documentary conventions; however, they do address the lasting effects of Indonesia’s 1965–66 purge of hundreds of thousands of Communists and suspected sympathizers that brought President Suharto’s New Order government to power. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s theorization of visuality and the right to look as the operations that construct a social imaginary and disrupt or alter it, I analyze how the films generate a sense of vertigo among viewers and the films’ character–participants through the complex, dangerous work of flamboyant performativity and self-precaritization. Vertigo, therefore, does not refer to the destabilizations through direct experience of atrocity, as addressed in psychoanalytic approaches to trauma theory, but to the possibility of radically destabilizing the narratives that sustain political sovereignty. Mirzoeff argues that the “performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a countervisuality into play.”79 Building from this insight, I examine the disruptive work of the films in the context of official silence or euphemism surrounding the purge—that is, how the films reveal the violence inherent in silence and provide the condition for new forms of political subjectivization to emerge. Together, the chapters that follow emphasize the interplay of literary and visual rhetorics with the normative human rights discourses of law, human rights reports, reportage, humanitarian appeals, and even silence; and that interplay offers a reminder that human rights are dynamic and subject to change as well as always in dialogue with other forms of representation. My argument and analyses place the embodied human subject at the center of a human rights discourse that is oriented toward the condition of shared vulnerability as opposed to the fantasy of inviolable security. This re-centering of human rights discourse—cultural, legal, civil, and political—in terms of vulnerability at once narrows the focus of human rights to human beings, as opposed to other animals and/or corporate actors, and deepens its potential alliances with alternative discourses of social justice. By demonstrating that human rights are rooted in the vulnerable, embodied subject whose historical and social particularities largely determine his or her capacity to be harmed as well as to be the author of claims, my readings identify at once the tendency of human rights to collapse vulnerability into victimhood as well as the possibility for a more capacious understanding of political subjectivity and, thus, of justice for the future.

Introduction  27

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Notes 1. Sangdrol’s fellow nun, Phuntsog Nyidron, achieved this designation for serving a sixteen-year sentence stemming from the same charges. 2. The Tibet Information Network produced an extensive report on Rukhag 3: The Nuns of Drapchi Prison (2000), by Steven D. Marshall; however, the organization closed in 2005 for lack of funds. Each of the nuns has, of course, a unique story, and not all of the nuns survived their experiences in prison. I focus on Sangdrol here because I know her well; I also draw on personal interviews conducted in 2007 with two of the other “singing nuns” as well as in 2010 with several of Sangdrol’s friends and relatives outside the US. 3. Lhasa City Intermediate People’s Court, (1993) Lhasa Sentence No. 42, translated by the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) and published as “‘Song of Sadness’ from Drapchi prison: the official Chinese Verdict on the Drapchi ‘singing nuns,’” ICT. 4. Sangdrol, “Statement of Ngawang Sangdrol.” 5. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions assessed her case in November 1995 and issued a formal protest to the Chinese government. 6. Schultheis, “Reading Tibet: Area Studies, Postcoloniality, and Tibetan Self-Determination.” 7. John Kamm, quoted in Tina Rosenberg, “John Kamm’s Third Way,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 3 March 2002. http:// www.nytimes. com/2002/03/03/magazine/john-kamm-s-third-way.html?pagewanted=1. 8. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, xxiii (original emphasis). 9. Personal interview, 3 March 2008. 10. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, 148. 11. Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. 12. Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh, xvi. 13. Drapchi 14, “Seeing Nothing But the Sky.” 14. Slaughter, “However Incompletely, Human,” 278. 15. John Kamm, “Statement on the Release of Ngawang Sangdrol,” Dui Hua, 17 October 2002. http://duihua.org/wp/?page_id=1935. 16. Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, 125. 17. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, ix. 18. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 135. 19. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 103–4. 20. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 104. 21. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 76. 22. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, 195. 23. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 48–49. 24. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 141. 25. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 140, 141. 26. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 49. 27. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” 28. Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures and the Debris of Legal Personhood, 33. 29. Naimou, Salvage Work, 36. 30. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 83.

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28 Introduction 1. Norzin Wangmo, quoted in Marshall, Rukhag 3: The Nuns of Drapchi Prison, 47. 3 32. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency, 12. 33. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience, 14. 34. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience, 238. 35. Ohlin, “Is the Concept of the Person Necessary for Human Rights?” 248–9. 36. Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature, 25, 26. 37. Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 33. 38. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 46. 39. Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” 40. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 24. 41. Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” 307. 42. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 25. 43. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 51. 44. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 13. 45. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 18. 46. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 19. 47. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 113. 48. K. Brown, “‘Vulnerability’: Handle with Care,” 314. 49. Bankoff, “Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse” and Dingo, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing. 50. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 15. 51. Berlant in Puar et al, “Precarity Talk,” 166. 52. See Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity, chapter 7. 53. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57, 55. 54. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57 as well as Grear, Redirecting Human Rights, chapter 6. 55. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 58. 56. Butler, Frames of War, 14. 57. Butler, Precarious Life, 31. 58. Butler, Precarious Life, 139. 59. Butler, Precarious Life, 143. 60. Butler, Precarious Life, 66. 61. Butler, Frames of War, 15. 62. Butler, Frames of War, 25. 63. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, 5. 64. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 63. 65. Lloyd, “Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability: Precarious lives and ungrievable deaths,” 92. 66. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 103.

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Introduction  29 7. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 104. 6 68. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 110. 69. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 111. 70. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 112, 110. 71. Lorey, State of Insecurity, 10. 72. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.” 73. Lorey, State of Insecurity, 63. 74. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights, 147. 75. Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 148–52. 76. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.” 77. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 176. 78. Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” 305. 79. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 24.

1 Spectrally Human

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African Child Soldier Narratives at the Limits of Legal Personhood

If we are the great innocents in this war, then where did we learn the evil we practice? Chris Abani, Song for Night

A primary feature of vulnerability theory is its attempt to characterize simultaneously a universal human condition and particular circumstances. On the one hand, vulnerability invokes the risks and rewards of relationality that everyone shares by virtue of embodied, affective existence: one’s susceptibility to loss, injury, violence, and death, as well as to desire, recognition, and community. On the other hand, when used in juridical contexts or in reference to imposed precarity, it defines and describes populations or persons in exceptional danger. Within international human rights legal instruments, “vulnerable populations” can refer to many kinds and categories of peoples, including women, children, refugees, prisoners, survivors of mass violence, persons defined according to mental capacity or debility, and so forth.1 Any list of vulnerable populations is notable for the lack of commonality among its terms: the definition may depend upon a wide range of natural and human-made factors such as physical or mental capacities, citizenship status, professional activities, or the experience of harm. What links these categories and triggers both the special procedural status of the claimants within international human rights law and the protective duties of the state to which they are entitled is their victimhood. Indeed, Sally Engle Merry writes that “[v]ictims must, therefore, be vulnerable and suffering bodies rather than political persons” to warrant human rights action.2 That vulnerability defined as victimhood in a way that seems to preclude political subjectivity activates liberal human rights law presents a central challenge: How can vulnerability theory frame an empowering, alternative approach to human rights as one path toward justice? As discussed in the introduction, embodied vulnerability, theorized by Anna Grear, strives to resolve this contradiction between vulnerability as victimhood and what I would call strategic vulnerability: vulnerability that does not wholly define subjectivity but describes a dimension of the subject’s social positionality that, while often linked to suffering, can also

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Spectrally Human  31 be mobilized for particular ends. Embodied vulnerability is “more than the capacity for suffering” in Grear’s theorization; it also defines the specific conditions of human intercorporeality, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in terms of the interrelationship of the human being and the world that takes place primarily through the subject’s sensory perception.3 Because a politics based in embodied human vulnerability requires an accounting for the specific circumstances of one’s differentiated existence, Grear writes that it enables “a political consciousness of standing in shared space.”4 But whose political consciousness is addressed here? Those who are vulnerable, or those who witness them? And what is the relationship between perception and the social imaginary in which it gains meaning? And to what extent can the experience or understanding of embodied vulnerability create or make visible space for the political agency of those very persons defined as vulnerable? Under what circumstances can personal vulnerability become transformed into the right to security of person as opposed to one’s biopolitical securitization within the global military-industrial complex (and its offshoots and legacies); or are the two inevitably one and the same? Answers to these questions depend not solely on a notion of shared space, but also of a shared time in which political consciousness can take shape and be exercised. Moreover, they depend upon the extent to which ideas and practices of strategic vulnerability can navigate between the (relatively privileged, safe) liberal subject and the (relatively marginalized, unsafe) victim to find modes of subjectivity beyond such entrenched binaries. The concept of embodied vulnerability shifts the politics of scale in the human rights arena from the universal and timeless to the particular; however, embodied vulnerable subjects’ bids for political agency, their use of strategic vulnerability, still run the risk of reactivating the very narratives of un-locatable victimhood they sought to avoid. Child soldiers illuminate this paradox within vulnerability theory and its application in human rights work. As subjects of varying ages and maturity who challenge easy distinctions between victims and perpetrators (and, correspondingly, easy distinctions between passivity and agency, or between innocence and culpability or complicity), their political claims to personal security and restitution for their suffering is often at odds with the harms they have committed and their own maturation. As shown below, child soldiers problematize the building blocks of normative human rights—the liberal subject, the nation-state, and the international order of states—along with the concepts of historical and civilizational progress to which they are tied. Although vulnerability approaches offer an alternative grounding for human rights claims to those framed by the liberal subject in relation to the nation-state, vulnerability can also be coopted by rhetorics of victimhood in ways that can rhetorically and materially reinforce precisely the suffering that rights claims seek to remedy. That potential for cooptation increases with respect to children, who are already ambiguously situated before the law as at once a protected group and, at the same time, potential yet often

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32  Spectrally Human still unqualified legal persons. As legal minors, they cannot fully represent themselves; however, the law simultaneously protects them from full culpability for their actions. How can one be protected by a law that fails to recognize her? Child soldiers further problematize the notion of legal qualification, because it is difficult to pinpoint where responsibility should rest for the crimes child soldiers commit. Considering the application of international human rights law on child soldiers, Wendy Hesford argues, that “the particularities of ‘embodied vulnerability’ are erased, and problematically so, in the process of stripping the child soldier of political identity and reclaiming the simultaneously generic and exceptional identity of the vulnerable child.”5 As Hesford notes, the identity category based upon the prototypical (Western) notion of the innocent, vulnerable child wrings political agency from children both in terms of the law’s protection and of its prosecution. This chapter builds upon and extends that argument through the lens of strategic vulnerability and a focus on representations of child soldiers in human rights law—the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and its Optional Protocol ([2000] 2002)—­primarily in relation to two recent literary fictions, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007). Together these texts point to the importance of temporality and the narrative scales used to represent it in defining the embodied and vulnerable human rights subject and the context of political subjectivization, in Rancière’s sense, even as the works exemplify the difficulty of writing outside of dominant narratives of the subject’s development such as the Bildungsroman. The concept of political subjectivization helps to undo the knot of child soldiers in the context of agency and passivity, not through the argument that children are any more mature, rational, agentic than they are (terms which would reconfirm the values of liberal subjectivity) or that the state should fulfill that role for them, but by insisting that child soldiers are always already situated in a specific political context. In contradistinction to the liberal subject for whom rights guarantee the path of civilizational progress and full humanity, or the immature liberal subject who will attain full legal personhood in the future, child soldiers (and survivors of the conflicts which include child soldiers) in the literature under consideration here register as “the spectrally human”: those subjects that Judith Butler reads in a different context as the products of a “spurious notion of civilization [that] provides the measure by which the human is defined at the same time that a field of would-be humans, the spectrally human, the deconstituted, are maintained and detained, made to live and die within that extra-human and extra-juridical sphere of life.”6 Iweala and Abani give voice to the spectrally human who often function as little more than disposable matériel in the conflicts they serve; in addition, Abani calls into question the civilizational and legal narratives that would redeem child soldiers as lost children who can be redirected along the path of first citizenship and then full humanity.

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Spectrally Human  33 On one level, Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night invoke the nationstate, the key political entity in this progress narrative: the texts are set in West Africa in conflicts that partially echo the Biafran war, and the authors’ aesthetics allude to work of their Nigerian literary forebears such as Amos Tutuola, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Wole Soyinka. On another level, however, as John Hawley has written of Beasts of No Nation, the novels participate in a “gradual movement away from the specifics of the Biafran war, towards the universalizing of what that civil conflict can be made to represent.”7 The texts are, thus, poised on the threshold of universal and transnational (including its emphasis on the nation) spaces of representation. Notwithstanding the literary and historical allusions, however, Iweala and Abani largely avoid the particularities of a given conflict and locale in favor of the contingent political space and time created between reader and text. This strategy raises the question of whether vulnerability untethered to historical specificity can avoid being coopted by totalizing discourses of victimhood. Janet Maslin, for instance, mimics Iweala’s use of the present continuous tense to foster the reader’s identification with his protagonist Agu throughout the novel in her review for the New York Times: “All we are knowing about Mr. Iweala is that his book will be readily embraced by readers. Its nuances may not be subtle, but its nobility is impossible to miss.”8 Her point—that the novel largely conforms to readerly expectations for the protagonist’s healing and redemption—is well taken, although that critique does not tell the whole story. Below I demonstrate how both novels attempt less to fictionalize or to make visible a claim on behalf of particular persons than to interrogate the terms in which claims on behalf of child soldiers are conventionally scripted. In this way, the novels illuminate the tension between the abstract, ostensibly universal, liberal subject of human rights and the vulnerable, transnational subjects of narrative imagination. Although both authors’ approaches are distinct from those typically used in what might be called child soldier fiction, by imagining the complex “entanglements” of temporality and subjectivity that characterize the postcolony in Achille Mbembe’s formulation,9 Iweala and Abani unsettle the existing political field of representation. For Mbembe, entanglement in the postcolonial context describes the “multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another.”10 Entanglement offers an alternative to historical linearity that might read the “post” in “postcolonial” as simply “after.” Entanglement refers to the heterogeneous forms of modernity that emerge vividly in postcolonial sites through the ongoing, uneven articulation of neoliberal, nationalist logics in conjunction with differentiated cultural ones. Thus, entanglement does not signal either a clash between or contradictory embrace of tradition and modernity, but disassembles that foundational binary. In Katherine Pratt Ewing’s example, “The new is experienced not as a ‘modernity’ that stands against tradition but as part of the everyday, where changes of all sorts are a part of life.”11 Mbembe pays particular

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34  Spectrally Human attention to the ways in which coloniality has shaped those changes. These temporal disjunctions—of persons understanding themselves through multiple temporalities—are crucial to the narratives of violence and trauma in the literary works; however, they serve other functions as well: entanglements disrupt the unitary paths of individual and national development that structure normative human rights and the successful Bildungsroman.12 The contexts of the novels are also defined by apparent failures of normative forms of political sovereignty, whatever their limitations, and their replacement by what Mbembe calls necropolitics—the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”13 in the violent competition for resources and power. Hovering between the necropolitics of predatory intra-state actors and the rescue and rehabilitation narrative implicit in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the novels demonstrate that “it is the interrelation between the sovereign right to kill and the [humanitarian] right to rescue that constitutes modes of modern power, whether by the state or by other institutions of power.”14 This interrelation, in turn, raises a question of the different subject positions that are generated by these two narratives and that might be imagined in the intervals between them. Drawing on George Bataille’s formulation of sovereignty as that which risks rather than avoids death, Mbembe theorizes the political away from the progressive narrative of inviolability secured through reason: “Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit.”15 Child soldiers as paradoxical figures of death and the future are poised at that limit, and novels disclose moments of political subjectivization that arise at the limit as well as the ways in which ideologies of liberalism reassert their hold to foreclose the imagination of alternative political subjects. For instance, Iweala grounds his protagonist Agu’s experience in social chaos that is, as befitting the child narrator, divorced from political concerns. In moments of extreme violence, Agu imagines himself in temporal entanglements coded by cultural distinction: acting out folktales, experiencing initiation rituals of manhood or animal sacrifice, or transformed into the animal world. In moments of nostalgia, he lingers over memories of his nuclear family, Bible study and church, and his role as prize student. Both worlds are mourned in the story, and the resulting void offers a space and time for the reassertion of the normative values conveyed through structures of the law and the Bildungsroman, although any resolution those structures offer Agu seems insufficient to compensate for the breakdown in social meaning he has experienced. Song for Night takes place more overtly on the faultline between life and death, at the limit Mbembe defines as constitutive of the political. It is there that the spectrally human—conveyed through the voice of the character My Luck—haunts worlds beyond that of the postcolony and the present-tense of the story, troubling the ideal of the vulnerable subject who can be made secure through the force of the law.

Spectrally Human  35

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Building Blocks of the Human Rights Regime To examine how vulnerability might function in relation to the key components of the human rights regime, I begin with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a powerful, global human rights discourse, in relation to novelistic representations of “the most famous character of the end of the 20th century,”16 the child soldier. In both forms of representation, a conventional narrative about childhood innocence and vulnerability typically produces one of three affective outcomes: mourning for the ideal childhood that has been damaged and, perhaps, cannot be reclaimed; consolation through the legal processes of redress or formal rituals of elegy; or redemption promised by the law, guaranteed by UN member states, and legible in the continued narration of the subject’s life story— what Barbara Harlow aptly describes as “the humanitarian generic instructions of DDR (disarmament-demobilization-rehabilitation) for the literary transcription of a former child soldier’s re-bildungsroman.”17 The extent to which child soldiers are at once fetishized and mourned thus depends upon the law’s power to define and, if possible, to restore an idealized image of the child through the paternalistic intervention of the international community. Figuring child soldiers as spectrally human, rather than as damaged potential subjects of liberalism, elicits responses that are not bound by the protocols of mourning and legal restitution. Whereas Butler uses “spectrally human” to describe those consigned to social abandonment and the state of exception, such as the Guantánamo detainees, and invokes mourning as a form of political recognition, here I examine the disruptive (in addition to elegiac) effects of hauntology for this paradigmatic human rights subject— paradigmatic in this reading because of the paradoxes of subjectivity and rights layered in representations of child soldiers, rather than because of their potentially dual status as victims and perpetrators. The characters and populations who figure as spectrally human in the literature under consideration in this chapter challenge the very terms through which they might be mourned. The ideological losses that are marked by child soldiers (the failures of the normative progress narrative of human rights, the ideal/vulnerable child, and the bildungsroman) increasingly haunt the social imaginary, reminding readers, in Jacques Derrida’s words, that “[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.”18 Indeed, ideological discussions of child soldiers pivot on a particular concept of childhood itself. In her contribution to the 2006 PMLA special issue on “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,” ­Jacqueline Bhabha begins her discussion of the ambiguous status of the child in human rights law and policy with the question, “What sort of human is a child?”19 Her analysis of the cultural and legal definitions of a child, particularly as formulated in the CRC, focuses on the ramifications of “[c]hildhood in this conception [as] romanticized and utopianized and at the same time peculiarly disenfranchised and disempowered.”20 She concludes that childhood “as a clearly demarcated space of limited autonomy is

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36  Spectrally Human an idealization of what it is to be human and a gloss on the relation between agency and rights.”21 Along with other populations designated as vulnerable, children are granted special protection in exchange for a limited degree of political agency. If childhood is a “distinctive way of being human” and one that deserves protection,22 the distinction ostensibly rests on the child’s incorporation of social investment and the still undetermined promise of its future returns: childhood should, in its idealized form, form the foundation for the proleptic, fully qualified subject of rights. In this sense, the figure of the child attracts all manner of laudatory—if empty—significations that essentially point to one temporal/sociopolitical space: the future; our future. According to the law, then, vulnerability figures as a temporary condition of limited capacity, including agency, in the human being’s development into a liberal subject within the family of nation-states. If vulnerability is a temporary anomaly, then it is produced by metaphorically faulty parenting, and invites intervention from normative human rights actors to serve in loco parentis. Not only are the protections for children as vulnerable subjects unequally available, but child soldiers, both proscribed and interpellated by the CRC, complicate its moral economy by signifying in its calculations what Mbembe calls a “logic of expenditure” in which “the giving of death has become a prime means of creating the world”23 (original emphasis), of governmentality through persistent, oftentimes domestic war that destroys existing social structures. Conflicts driven by the “logic of expenditure,” whose objectives may be local even though they may result from a global struggle for resources, produce “not only […] the coercion to which people are subjected, and the sufferings inflicted on the human body by war, scarcity, and destitution, but also embrace a whole cluster of re-orderings of society, culture, and identity, and a series of recent changes in the way power is exercised and rationalized.”24 Mbembe theorizes these re-orderings and their effects on law, political power, social structures, and culture that characterize the relationship between the “privatization of public violence […] and the imagination of the self” in the postcolony and that are magnified in conditions of violent, intra-national social upheaval.25 In the specific context of conflicts that include child soldiers, entanglement could seem to indicate the need for the forceful application—through international intervention—of the values promulgated by the CRC and thus the restoration of the civilizational, developmental narrative (­Harlow’s DDR) it conveys. What I am suggesting instead is that reading the law and fiction in tandem makes visible the limitations of the conceptual building blocks of the CRC, and that this reading praxis illuminates the imagination of other narratives of human rights that might complement, address imbalances, or respond to lacunae within normative human rights discourse. Reading the law and literature in conversation with one another demonstrates the importance, first, of considering the extent to which a vulnerability approach that focuses on the spectrally human challenges

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Spectrally Human  37 a singular definition of the human rights subject; and, second, of understanding haunting and hetero-temporal entanglement beyond the putative confines of the postcolony to describe human rights as a biopolitical and geopolitical regime in broader terms. Finally, reading between law and literature underscores their discursive intersections. Marianne Constable insists that “legal speech acts of representatives of official law as well as the claims of their critics are performative and passionate, designed to evoke in their respective hearers a shared sense of obligation that is not only conventionally performed but also a matter of desire.”26 I turn to fiction that engages with legal norms and constraints to connect the performative and passionate claims of the law to the performative and passionate claims of its imagined subjects and to trace how together these discourses work to shape the broader social imaginary. Although the participation of children in armed conflict is not new historically,27 recent legal mechanisms, legal criticism, humanitarian efforts, social sciences reports, and literary and filmic productions have increased its public profile. Estimates of child soldiers worldwide originally published in the 1996 UN study by Graça Machel on the Impact of Armed Conflict upon Children and in subsequent Child Soldiers Global Reports by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, among other organizations, consistently approximate 300,000 child soldiers engaging in armed conflict at any given time. Although found in an estimated two-thirds of recent or ongoing conflicts, they are often associated with unstable and lesser-developed areas of the world and signify political failure, as though the soldiers’ maturity is indicative of the nation’s.28 Despite widespread recognition that child soldiering is not a contemporary phenomenon, scholars define trends in how warfare is conducted that arguably facilitate its use. Michael Wessells and Alcinda Honwana cite developments in the technology and distribution of light weaponry, a shift from conventional war between states to war within or across them, increasingly blurred lines between civilian and military combatants, the targeting of civilians in war, difficulty in distinguishing war from criminality, and links between “new” wars and broader breakdown in social structures as the key components of this crisis.29 Mbembe emphasizes the economic and political realities at the core of many such conflicts: “[T]heir central stake is the control of resources, whose modes of extraction and forms of commercialization feed, in turn, the murderous conflicts and practices of predation.”30 In place of anti-colonial rhetoric that galvanized earlier liberation movements, the conflicts he considers are often fueled by the “preponderance of tropes and dichotomies that draw on ontology, degeneracy, and theologies of health”31—fears that have circulated around witchcraft or Ebola, for instance, and that circulate through rhetorics of ­embodied vulnerability and illustrate how those rhetorics can be mobilized or exploited for either humanitarian or violent ends. Militarized children function ambiguously within such discourses, signifying moral corruption and degeneracy on the one hand and an image of futurity on the other.

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38  Spectrally Human Critiques of the paternalism and latent or overt racism in many portrayals of child soldiers in postcolonial contexts come from many different disciplines. In his broad study of child soldiers, David M. Rosen pays particular attention to postcolonial conditions and the roots of social disintegration. Disputing the rationale of light arms development as a catalyst of child soldiering (he argues the weapon of choice is the AK-47, available since 1949) and the rhetoric surrounding child soldiers as inevitable by-products of (failed) postcolonial nation-states, he rightly cautions against the automatic coupling of postcolonialism with chaos, violence, exploitation and irrationality.32 Otherwise, the figure of the child soldier as a metonymic substitution for a wayward, irrational state appears suspiciously in need of assistance from a sensible, firm adult (with international humanitarian institutions and former colonizers performing functions of parent, lawyer, and therapist). Rosen draws attention to the role of non-governmental organizations in lobbying efforts to develop international humanitarian law regarding child soldiers, and cites the Machel Report, a landmark study of child soldiering “authorized,” he suggests, by Graça Machel’s participation in national liberation movements (and marriage to Nelson Mandela), for providing “a template for virtually all human rights reporting on child soldiers”33: “Machel’s revolutionary ‘credentials’ are important because the idea that warfare in the postcolonial world is qualitatively different from earlier forms of war is central to the humanitarian narrative.”34 Although the idea that postcolonial conflicts involving child soldiers are new lends urgency to humanitarian efforts, those efforts rarely consider the colonial underpinnings to the structural inequalities and political imbalances that produce violence. This critique of dominant humanitarian approaches to child soldiers raises the question of how to write about the use and experiences of child soldiers, and African child soldiers in particular, as a serious problem in and of itself and a challenge to future social stability without replicating the ethnocentric bias of much of the commentary. Rosen’s insight into how a globalized “politics of age” in legal and humanitarian narratives of child soldiers substitutes for a more material politics about social inequity in the postcolony and around the globe provides an important check on the enthusiastic consumption, at least in the global North, of fiction that features African child soldiers.35 Andrew Mawson asks, “Can a convenient fiction about what is a child carry the weight of so much violence?”36 In response, Rosen argues for scholars to attend more carefully to the differentiated ways in which children participate in armed conflict and to the roots of those conflicts under consideration. The continuing conversation among human rights workers, legal scholars, reporters, and cultural workers over the definition, status, and legal protections accorded child soldiers has, notwithstanding trenchant critiques, coalesced around notions of the child (as a person below age eighteen) in armed conflict as an innocent victim of adult and state or intra-state

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Spectrally Human  39 depravity, who is in need of protection by the very forces that have already seemingly failed him or her. Embedded in these narratives is a politics of age that reflects the ideological positions and political objectives of the participants in these discussions.37 The negotiated consensus in international humanitarian law (IHL) on child soldiers, while designed to ensure the greatest possible scope of protection, elides the intertwined problems of their re-presentation, in the sense of depiction of and speaking for, implicit in consensus itself; at the same time, some literary narratives, anthropological readings, and legal critiques draw attention to those elisions through close analysis of cultural constructions of childhood and the distribution of juridico-political agency that attends it. The predicament of child soldiers in international humanitarian and human rights law falls primarily under the jurisdiction of the CRC (1989) and the Optional Protocol to the CRC on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (Optional Protocol, adopted 2000, entered into force 2002).38 Echoing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the CRC seeks to protect the child’s “full development of his or her personality” (Preamble). Other key provisions include: the child’s right to a name, nationality, and family (Article 7); the duty of public and private institutions to consider “the best interests of the child” (Article 1); the recognition of the child’s right to freedom of expression, thought, conscience, and religion (Articles 13 and 14); and, complicating the issue of who may define and articulate the “best interests” stipulated in Article 1, protection for “the child who is capable of forming his or her own views [of] the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child” (Article 12). Re-iterated chronologically as a narrative of the child’s life, the CRC calls for name, family, and citizenship at birth; parental and then social instruction in early childhood (including the development of religious beliefs, exposure to media, shaping of autonomous reason, public education, and gradually increased exposure to risk); growing responsibilities as well as the ongoing need for leisure toward the end of childhood; and then full maturation and reasoned autonomy. Speaking directly about child soldiers, the CRC stipulates fifteen as the minimum age for armed service (Article 15) and requires States to “promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of […] armed conflicts” (Article 39). That a child soldier, who may have perpetrated egregious crimes, reads as a victim reflects the protective aims of the Convention. The Optional Protocol extends the law’s protective reach by invoking the Straight 18 definition of a child, which raises the minimum age for recruitment from 15 to 18 and asserts that those under 18 should not “take a direct part in hostilities” (Articles 1, 2, and 3), although it does permit “voluntary recruitment into [States’] national armed forces under the age of 18.”39 Many analysts and legal advocates adopt the more inclusive principles articulated in UNICEF’s Cape Town Annotated Principles and Best Practices of 1977 of a child soldier as “any person under 18 years of age who is part of

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40  Spectrally Human any kind of regular or irregular armed force in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family members.” The definition also includes “[g]irls recruited for sexual purposes and forced marriage […]. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has carried arms.”40 These legal standards seek to provide an even wider scope of protections for children who take part by choice or conscription in violent conflict, and thus do not differentiate between the various roles children serve. The legal excerpts above do not capture the full scope of these documents; however, they intimate the ways in which, as Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff write, “the effort to make human rights into an ever more universal discourse, and to ascribe ever more authority to it, gives impetus to the remapping of the cartography of jurisdictions.”41 Notwithstanding the ostensible universality of the legal principles, geopolitical forces determine their availability to children in war. Moreover, whereas responsibility for a child’s well-being rests primarily with the immediate family, in conflict situations considered by IHL that responsibility moves quickly to the international community according to a prescribed set of values. As many scholars have noted, the CRC and its attendant instruments purport to set universal standards; however, they normalize a particular construction of the human being-as-legal subject that is most legible within western traditions. The definition of childhood as a time of innocence, play (rather than work), and the cultivation of “full development of personality” reflects an investment in liberal, capitalist values dependent upon the individual’s successful negotiation of separate public and private spheres.42 In her excellent reading of the ideological presuppositions of the CRC, Sharon Stephens notes that the Convention recognizes “a universal, free-standing individual child [… who is] on a particular developmental trajectory.”43 The acknowledgment of “the importance of the traditions and cultural values of each people” follows well after the reiteration of the UDHR’s recognition of inherent rights, broadly liberal values, individual development, and the family “as the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members” (CRC, Preamble). “The Convention argues,” Stephens summarizes, “that the child has first and foremost a right to international modernist culture […,] then to identity (conceived in individual, familial, and national terms), and finally, in special cases, to minority and indigenous cultures.”44 The psychosocial approach to “recovery and social reintegration of a child victim” (CRC, Article 39), often defined and administered by international humanitarian organizations with the backing of international law, reasserts that hierarchy of desirable cultural values and those who maintain them. Therapeutic language regarding the abstract individual or legal person further masks structural inequities and political crises, which are frequently articulated in terms of cultural difference at the root of conflict.45 In addition, the language of psychosocial rehabilitation fails to consider both

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Spectrally Human  41 its own cultural roots as well as the problem that the subject will only be legible in a social context that, given the subject’s current status, has already been severely compromised. The CRC pays little attention to the forms of healing, and whether they pertain primarily to the community or the individual, whose meanings and effectiveness are local. Significantly, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990, entered into force 1999) gets little attention in the critiques explored above, although it does re-connect the rights holder and moral agent (as one with duties) within the context of pan-African identifications. The African Charter emphasizes the “preservation and strengthening of positive African morals, traditional values and cultures” among its core objectives (Preamble and Article 11), offers a broader definition of family (Article 20) than the CRC and Optional Protocol, and details specific responsibilities of the child toward the family, society, state, legal community, and international community (Article 31). More precisely, Article 31 enumerates every child’s duty to “respect his parents, superiors and elders at all times,” to serve the nation, to “preserve and strengthen African cultural values,” and to work on behalf of African Unity. Although the Charter maintains the Straight 18 definition of a child adopted in the Optional Protocol, it creates a space for multiple readings of what (not when) childhood should be. At the same time, the Charter’s emphasis on state power, obedience to elders, and the political goals of pan-Africanism limits the possibility of claims against abusive states. In her reading of the relationship between IHL and the contexts in which it is invoked on behalf of children, Vanessa Pupavac finds an inherent pathologizing of adults, especially those in the global South.46 If children do not have access to the protected sphere of childhood enshrined in IHL, “the plight of children” (when abstracted and divorced from p ­ olitical context) “implicitly or explicitly blames the adults for their fate.”47 Pupavac rests her argument on the “separation of the rights-holder and the moral agent” in IHL principles that concern children.48 Despite the provision in the CRC for protection of the child’s articulation of his or her own views, freedom of expression does not equal a guarantee to exercise control over one’s own “best interest.” That responsibility rests first with parents or guardians and then with the state. If, however, as Comaroff and Comaroff argue, the “court has become a utopic institutional site to which human agency may turn for a medium in which to achieve its ends,”49 a corollary of the growing jurisdiction is its transnational governmentality over non-conventional and often intra-national armed conflict and the subjects within them. The mobilization of campaigns on behalf of child soldiers, potentially enhanced through the protection of their right to be heard, can thus effectively create opportunities for “lawfare” by international organizations in local contexts.50 As employing child soldiers becomes increasingly narrated as criminal rather than political, the call for legal intervention gets louder and “the discourse of crime displaces attention

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42  Spectrally Human away from the material and social effects of neoliberalism, blaming its darker undersides on the evils of the underworld.”51 This trend simultaneously shifts the weight of concern about security from vulnerable populations to the institutions of legal enforcement—border agents, security personnel, police, etc. Narratives of criminality only reinforce the view that the use of child soldiers is a form of social deviance that violates an ideal. In this ideological loop, child soldiers as human rights subjects become contextualized. The historical and political roots of ahistorical and de-­ their conflicts, as well as their social-familial contexts, are erased, such that they belong primarily to the category “child soldier” and the objects of humanitarianism mobilized on their behalf.

Child Soldiers and Literary Traditions The many paradoxes of child soldiers in the law similarly problematize their literary representation, and Iweala and Abani address the question posed by Joseph Slaughter, “What happens to the story form of human personality development when the modern institutional guarantors of social order and meaning—the democratic state and the public sphere that replaced Nature and Nature’s God—have been perverted?”52 In Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night, child soldiers as narrators of their own stories restore the necessary link Pupavac identifies between rights holder and moral agent, but to what end? Although as children they have only immature standing in legal and moral realms, as narrators they have an authority that is difficult to marginalize in favor of another source. Structurally, it is the task of the Bildungsroman as a novel of formation to resolve this tension. The CRC’s universalizing, legal narrative of a child who should be nurtured in certain ways in order to achieve full subjectivity in autonomous, bounded individualism finds a literary equivalent in the genre of the Bildungsroman that Franco Moretti describes as “the symbolic form that more than any other has portrayed and promoted modern socialization.”53 In his landmark book on the formal intersections of human rights and literature, Slaughter looks at the roots of this alliance in narrative parallels between the UDHR (which the CRC echoes) and the Bildungsroman, both of which are quintessentially and paradigmatically modern forms whose didactic function is the production of discursive norms.54 The “novelization of citizenship” in these forms depends upon an idealized public sphere with the ability to “manufacture consent for the state’s legitimacy.”55 For if, as Moretti states, the Bildungsroman is “the most contradictory of modern symbolic forms,” then it demonstrates that “in our world socialization itself consists first of all in the interiorization of a contradiction” (original emphasis) between the private individual and the public sphere.56 Narratives of child soldiers, whose interiority is ostensibly immature as is their agency in the public sphere, reveal fissures within the legal and literary Bildungsroman’s ideological assumptions. In terms of context, whereas the public sphere corresponds

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Spectrally Human  43 to the nation in the conventional Bildungsroman, Iweala and Abani’s fiction at once draws upon a Nigerian literary tradition, as well as aspects of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, and extends beyond them.57 As the titles of both novels indicate, they seek to address the problematics of representing child soldiers within Anglophone literature more generally as opposed to ­Nigerian literature alone. Because child soldiers are tethered to the developmental narrative of the law, yet embody contradiction (at once vulnerable and violent, victims and perpetrators, innocent and knowing), they call forth the promise and failure of law and politics as well as act as agents of “the destruction of all social bonds—other than the bond of hostility.”58 These contradictions produce much of the narrative tension for child soldiers in literary fiction: the “destruction of all social bonds” seems to call for either their restoration or reformulation by the story’s end. Addressing these readerly expectations and the pedagogical function of the Bildungsroman, Moretti argues that the representation of modernity depends upon the satisfactory progression from youthful individualism in the sense of uniqueness to adulthood and full citizenship: “by curbing [youth’s] intrinsically boundless dynamism, only by agreeing to betray to a certain extent its very essence […] Only thus, we may add, can it be ‘made human.’”59 If assuaging modernity’s “hostile force”60 depends upon this narrative teleology, child soldiers would seem to mark the failure of that effort. However, I am suggesting that Iweala’s and Abani’s novels, in making visible the expected terms of modernity through their play with the Bildungsroman form, also call those terms into question. These two texts do not offer the materialism of embodied vulnerability and historical specificity to countermand the effects of innocence and victimhood; rather, they challenge conventional representational categories and temporalities of child soldiers. Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night are driven by the question of narrative completion, of how the narrators will fare in relation to normative models of development and justice. Iweala’s and Abani’s child soldier protagonists, Agu and My Luck, embody the contradictions found in the legal definitions of child soldiers, although the novels resolve those contradictions in different ways. In Beasts of No Nation, Agu rapes (and is raped), pillages, and murders, though Iweala gives him the foundations of a conscience: “I am not bad boy. I am soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. I am telling this to myself because soldier is supposed to be killing, killing, killing. So if I am killing, then I am only doing what is right. I am singing song to myself because I am hearing too many voice in my head telling me I am bad boy.”61 Agu’s relentlessly present continuous and immature voice, victimization, and desire for moral grounding create conditions of sympathy for him as a potential subject of the law who, notwithstanding the violence he has committed, is still in need of protection. Abani’s My Luck refuses to take refuge in this contradictory though powerful ideology of the child in need of rehabilitation. My Luck’s initiation into conflict at age thirteen left him “armed and lost in a war with taste for

44  Spectrally Human

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rape.” In a voice that is anything but childlike, he remembers another crucial transformation, when Ijeoma said: “I will save you.” And she did. [… T]hat night and every night after that, whenever we raided a town or a village, while the others were raping the women and sometimes the men, Ijeoma and I made desperate love, crying as we came, but we did it to make sure that amongst all that horror, there was still love.62 My Luck’s complicated construction as the narrator subverts the terms and rationale of the legal conventions. At the outset, he is a landmine diffuser, a fifteen-year-old who can still pass for twelve, yet who is capable of deep love with a fellow “soldier” (who was not “recruited for sexual purposes and forced marriage,” but who joined willingly, as did the other children in their platoon), and a narrator whose gestures function as “lyrical similes”63 and whose textual voice speaks primarily in the mature language of poetics. Although under age eighteen and a participant in war, he invites neither saving (Ijeoma has already accomplished that), retribution, or moral development (he is beyond the reaches of both). Instead he insists on his desires, longings, and rationales. His language supersedes the law’s ability to foster the “full development of personality” called for in the UDHR and the CRC, while the narrative places him beyond the law’s claims and effects. Of course, the full development of personality is one of the major areas of overlap between the language of IHL and the Bildungsroman, and Slaughter reads their ideological implications through three major trajectories of ­Bildungsromane. Between the idealist Bildungsroman, in which the individual and society “achieve a mutual accord,” and the realist form, which “tend[s] to depict the social order as intractable” such that “personality development appears as a process of assimilation,” he locates the “dissensual,” often postcolonial Bildungsroman of the global South: “The dissensual Bildungsroman inverts the affirmative rights claim of the idealist genre by publicizing the discrepancy between the rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity and the inegalitarian social formations and relations in which that rhetoric is put into historical practice.”64 Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night complicate these options, because the stories emerge out of the disintegration of the public sphere itself (with direct mention of the colonial and neocolonial powers that provide support for that disintegration and are implicated in its causes) and, thus, the concept of modernity to which it is tied. In other words, the social disintegration that takes place in the novels is a product of modernity as opposed to an aberration from it. Song for Night in particular does not so much invert the relationship between rights rhetoric and social inequalities as deconstruct it. Abani offers a first-person narration that cannot be fused to a liberal subject and that draws attention to its own construction. In this way, the novella as a failed Bildungsroman asks readers

Spectrally Human  45 to think critically about the terms through which child soldiers as the spectrally human—those whose vulnerability and violence not just demand the protective force of the law but simultaneously undermine its foundational narratives—might nonetheless become legible.

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The Politics of Space and Time How, then, do the spatial and temporal entanglements of the novels differ from the spatialization of time that takes place through application of the developmental narrative of the CRC and its attendant instruments upon the postcolony? Entanglement potentially, though not necessarily, complicates or diversifies the narrative possibilities of human rights. If entanglement makes it possible to “envisage subjectivity itself as temporality,” as Mbembe argues,65 then the “interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones”66 also makes it possible to imagine alternative discourses of rights and their claimants. The project of imagining alternatives stems from different facets of vulnerability: relationality constituted through local, communal (as opposed to ostensibly universal and secular) beliefs, languages, and practices; the work of mourning those formerly considered expendable; or the necessity of acknowledging the haunting presence of the spectrally human. I consider both the potential and limitations of each of these possibilities in turn. In his forceful critique of (capitalized) Human Rights as a “global structure of laws, courts, norms, and organizations that raise money, write reports, run international campaigns, open local offices, lobby governments, and claim to speak with a singular authority in the name of humanity as a whole,”67 Stephen Hopgood argues for the continued necessity of ­lower-case human rights: a “nonhegemonic language or resistance” and reciprocity that is grounded in local contexts.68 This turn to the local and the ­hetero-temporalities it might include corresponds to arguments for a concept of modernity not tied to western models of individual, national, and capitalist development. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for instance, emphasizes the need to bridge the divide between “the analytic and the affective” in rereading modernity as something other than a product of Enlightenment reason.69 Fiction’s capacity for ambiguity and incommensurability can assist with the “move away from the monomania of the imagination that operates within the gesture that the knowing, judging, willing subject always already knows what is good for everybody, ahead of any investigation.”70 For Chakrabarty, the discourses, practices, and temporalities of cultural difference disrupt that monomania and, with it, a singular narrative of History. In order to re-­imagine history from subaltern subject positions that do not yearn for but “[disrupt] the languages of the state, of citizenship, of wholes and totalities, [and] the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism,” he argues for the development of “analytical categories in academic discourse that do

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46  Spectrally Human justice to the real, everyday and multiple ‘connections’ we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as ‘non-rational.’”71 Chakrabarty’s argument has also been critiqued for reinforcing the division between rationality and “non-rationality” in ways that ultimately re-ascribe what is non-rational to what is culturally distinct from a western secular norm. The concept of entanglement avoids that risk, while countering the notion of a singular, totalizing narrative of History and modernity. Agu and My Luck similarly resist the romanticization of cultural difference; instead, they evince the promise of theories of hetero-temporality to generate histories of those consumed by the march of progress. Agu and My Luck signify that child soldiers represent something other than familial-national deviations from History, that their contradictions are not deviations from but rather imbrications of modernity. My Luck’s haunting presence, for example, by refusing to represent some form of lost or damaged cultural authenticity, instead “test[s] the limits of death or of its meaning in a world of terror,” as Colin Dayan evocatively describes the contemporary work of ghosts.72 Although Abani explicitly warns against reading My Luck ethnographically as a voice of cultural difference, the intent of Beasts of No Nation is more ambiguous because of the multiple significations of the title. It speaks to the inhumanity that Agu experiences, but also to moments where he imagines himself as an animal in West African fables. In these moments, as one of Chakrabarty’s most trenchant critics, Vasant Kaiwar, writes, “[s]ubversive history, it turns out, is nothing more than a proxy for what Chakrabarty elsewhere calls the time of the gods.”73 As Kaiwar writes in another emphatic critique, “Postcolonial theory seems utterly fascinated by goblins, fairies, gods and spirits of all kinds, possibly suggesting the richly enchanted world of third-world subalterns in opposition to the disenchanted, ­Enlightenment-inspired secular universe we live in.”74 The overlap of “postcolonial” with “non-rational” or “supernatural” contributes to exoticizing narratives of postcolonial difference and elides questions of capital and labor that constitute the logic of expenditure which fuels the use of child soldiers. The logic of expenditure also elicits the work of mourning, although the political force of mourning is subject for debate. Judith Butler emphasizes the need “to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human,”75 which suggests the need to make visible the suffering of child soldiers in terms that would allow them to be mourned. For Butler, grief (and grievability) “furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility.”76 However, one could also argue that child soldiers have become hyper-visible in contemporary cultural representations and that these representations, as Hesford argues, tend to vacate political complexity and agency in favor of an undifferentiated narrative of victimhood. The elegiac titles of Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night,

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Spectrally Human  47 in addition to other popular texts such as Invisible Children (Invisible Children: Rough Cut, 2003) and A Long Way Gone (2007), reflect the failure of certain idealizations of subject and nation. Mourning those failures depends upon and reinforces ostensibly timeless images of both the innocent child and childhood innocence. The calls to mourning in the titles, however, also imply a relationship between those failures or losses and global cultural production, as that which is mourned returns through the production and consumption of the stories themselves.77 The roots of social inequities and political failures that produce child soldiers in the postcolonial contexts of these stories often remain unmarked, although the geopolitical distribution of inequity and failure they represent contributes to their circulation in the global marketplace. Thus, mourning and marketability are enhanced by a clear distance between the worlds of reader and text as opposed to the collapse of that distance. Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night can illuminate the (neo)imperial and global implications of the conflicts involving child soldiers and the stories, legal and otherwise, that get told about them. Indeed, S­ laughter argues that “what we might call the new literary humanitarianism—the Western desire for Bildungsromane of the non-Western other that is enacted through book markets—may be the latest in a series of globalizing forces that encourages the technology-transfers of human rights and the Bildungsroman.”78 Iweala and Abani write to considerable acclaim, and Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night share many features of the disarmament-­ demobilization-rehabilitation “novel of formation” that Harlow identifies. Significantly, Beasts of No Nation adheres more closely to that trajectory and has sold much more widely.79 Whereas the popularity of the genre and these particular novels perhaps indicates public interest in the conditions that produce child soldiers and their futures, the fictional authority of child soldiers underscores their greater currency as “phantom subjects of history”80 who bear the weight of idealization and of atrocity despite their limited autonomy and legal standing. The layered meanings of the spectrally human—those who are consigned to social abandonment or the logic of expenditure, yet whose presence haunts “the structure of every hegemony”81—recoup the potential of a critical mourning that disturbs the calculation of human rights and victimhood and clears a space for political subjectivization, in the sense of one’s emergence as a political subject and to broaden the forms of political engagement that are visible. The analysis of these novels that follows resists the temptation to read the spectrally human of the novels and their haunting as evidence of supernatural alterity to a narrowly scripted modernity. The characters do, however, demonstrate the work of mourning as conjuration whose spatio-temporal dislocations make possible a “politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations”82 (original emphasis) that Derrida defines as crucial for constituting an ethical regard for an other. This politics does not always feature the agentic subject, as such, but always demands attention

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48  Spectrally Human to political context and the narratives that are legible within it. The interruption of established narratives of the Bildungsroman, national history, and the rehabilitation of child soldiers is not, in other words, necessarily subaltern or subversive; however, it does require reading across existing temporal and spatial frames and therefore making possible the imagination of alternative discourses of human rights. As Derrida notes, the haunting effects of heterotemporality—its ability to disrupt the present—is essential for justice in the future: “Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’” (original emphasis).83 Conjuration reverses the force of mourning such that the lost object or person becomes a witness to the present. As witnesses to atrocity who can speak from the past and into the present and perhaps the future, Agu and My Luck shift the focus of mourning from grief to, if not responsibility, interpellation, and they do so by defining themselves as subjects of human rights untethered to the pragmatics of legal personhood. Their hauntings have both reductive and productive potential, depending upon the ways that the narrators and the trajectories of their stories ultimately secure or undermine the promise of the Bildungsroman. In productive terms, as Avery Gordon notes, “[p]erceiving the lost subjects of history—the missing and lost ones and the blind fields they inhabit—makes all the difference to any project trying to find the address of the present.”84 Fiction’s ability to reveal those “blind fields” brings to the forefront the role of child soldiers in the logic of expenditure, and, thus, that logic itself. In doing so, “[h]aunting occurs,” Gordon notes, “on the terrain situated between our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism or State Terror, for example, and the various experiences of this logic, experiences that are more often than not partial, coded, symptomatic, contradictory, ambiguous.”85 At the same time, the texts disclose the limits of haunting: it succeeds more to expose the logics of violent exclusion than to imagine an alternative to them.

Expendability and Revaluation in Beasts of No Nation As noted above, Derrida theorizes that “this being-with specters” also constitutes a “politics of memory” necessary for an ethics that looks to the future: No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or

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who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence.86 The “politics of memory” in this case also reads as a politics of form, and the character of the child soldier continually challenges the Bildungsroman’s ability to synthesize individual and nation through successive generations of Nigerian literature. As I have discussed elsewhere, by invoking the child in war (as refugee or soldier) as a spectral presence, Amos Tutuola in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Ken Saro-Wiwa in Sozaboy present a kind of temporal and perspectival doubling that enables readings within and against the nation as a coming-of-age story. For Tutuola, life in the Bush of Ghosts provides a critical distance from which to examine the terms of the Bildungsroman, even if it reiterates those terms. Given the narrator’s desire to continue to trespass across the worlds of life and death, the novel leaves no clear formulation of the future of a Yoruban or Nigerian public sphere, although it sketches parameters for such a sphere by combining folktale and the modern novel in the late-colonial moment.87 Saro-Wiwa aligns the crisis of the postcolonial state with that of the subject, wherein the success of the former comes seemingly at the expense of the latter, the materiality of Sozaboy’s “rotten English” insufficient to ward off social death. Iweala and Abani take up this doubling in different ways. Iweala’s Agu reads as a post-national descendent of the earlier authors in the way his voice, now abstracted from specific ethnic or regional context, is, according to the author, “inspired by voices of ordinary Nigerians, and of course by such writers as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola” and “is as much a character as his person.”88 Voice locates him literarily and substitutes for the historical particularities of embodied vulnerability. Working parallel to the voice are the novel’s geographic non-specificity—the story takes place in an unnamed West African nation—coupled with its reassertion of what Slaughter describes as “the idealist developmental compulsion of human rights and Bildung in [global] literature.”89 Abani, on the other hand, contests that narrative through the spectral presence of My Luck, for whom no dissensual or consensual accommodation to the public sphere will occur. Intertwining local, national, and global affiliations, Abani nonetheless refutes the implication that the Bildungsroman can secure a viable future for a (former) child soldier in either national or global literary terms. This clears a space for other narratives and negotiations of modern subjectivity that might acknowledge if not embrace the ethical injunctions of that subject’s own ghosts. Midway through Beasts of No Nation, Agu begins the story of his family’s dissolution in wartime through a fractured perspective indicative of war’s assault on coherent subjectivity: “Behind my eye I am seeing.”90 The politics of memory here recalls the breakdown of civil society as violence rapidly approaches. His father loses the teaching job that secures their middle-class life and soon the United Nations evacuates women and children. Agu, left

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50  Spectrally Human behind with his father and “the men of this village” to honor ancestors and guard private property, recognizes this protective measure as another form of social collapse: “Nothing in the village is the same without the women cooking food and selling groundnut and talk talking so all of the men are just staying quietly quietly like somebody is dying.”91 The simile proves apt as war arrives via guns and machetes, and Agu flees, laden only with “seeing bullet making my father to dance everywhere with his arm raising high to the sky like he is praising God.”92 That vision haunts Agu throughout the novel, continually reminding him of the impossibility of adequately understanding his egregious circumstances in familial terms. Situated at the heart of the narrative, the loss of family becomes a catalyst for a proliferation of fractured perspectives that extend from Agu’s initiation into violence in the first two chapters up until he finds himself in an NGO rehabilitation center in the penultimate chapter. Wandering through war with a weapon but without any discernible political agenda, he constantly sees double: “If I am closing my eye, I am seeing”; “Everything is inside out like my shirt I am wearing”; “I am standing outside myself”; “I am looking at Commandant and Strika and I am also thinking to myself that both of them are looking so peaceful and beautiful like how we are looking before the war, like how we are being after the war, but not like now”; “Suddenly, I am standing here in this room, but I am also standing in my classroom in the shadow.”93 Soldiers dancing in the camp remind him of the annual male initiation ceremonies in the village through the Dance of the Leopard and the Ox: Everybody is knowing that to be killing masquerade you are removing its mask. All of the dancer is removing their mask. All of the spirit are dying and now all the boy is becoming men. I am opening my eye and seeing that I am still in the war, and I am thinking, if war is not coming, then I would be man by now.94 This scene effectively divorces violence from manhood and critiques the loss of communal codes of conduct that contain rather than condone violence. Without those codes, murder and rape substitute for traditional initiation ceremonies, but do not fulfill their social function: Agu sees himself as a soldier, but not a man. Memory here has an ethical function in establishing a perspective from which Agu can recognize wartime violence, ostensibly in the name of group solidarity, as the destruction rather than reinforcement of social bonds. Memory and the entanglements of time and culture do not necessarily produce ethical action. The scene above follows a horrific rape and murder in the novel in which the folkloric narrative fails to provide that critical distance on the violence at hand, and instead seems to displace its material effects onto an imaginative realm for which Agu feels no responsibility. As Agu’s team finds a mother and daughter hiding in a house and begins

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Spectrally Human  51 to assault them, the mother’s scream triggers a complementary parable: “AYIIIEEE, like it is the creation of my village when long ago great warrior and his army are just fighting fighting enemy in the bush near my village.” The creation story links the placement of the village to mythic parents of the village mourning over the “abomination” of their sons killing each other when they fail to recognize their fraternity under the masquerade of difference. Yet Agu positions himself against the lesson of the story, insisting, “I am grabbing the woman and her daughter. They are not my mother and my sister.”95 Although the immediate and folkloric mother’s screams intersect in his telling, Agu can only recognize mother and daughter as the enemy, and he and his friend Strika dismember them. The story of the ox and the leopard—retold twice in this short section— exemplifies “the relationship of active dissociation” from the past in which “bonds of hostility,” such as those shared by Strika and Agu, replace earlier affiliative narratives.96 Mbembe provides the foundation for reading these scenes as components of a “political culture founded on the use of force and the emergence of an ethic of masculinity that rests on the public and violent expression of acts of virility,”97 rather than solely as expressions of chaotic, senseless violence. Particularly in the case of child soldiers, for whom the “possession of a gun acts as an equivalent to the acquisition of a phallus […,] the mediations between the gun and the phallus are not just imaginary.” In these equations, moreover, “woman is constituted as the surplus—that which can be spent without worry of replenishment.”98 Significantly, the disposability of women substitutes temporarily for that of child soldiers: rape as a weapon of war provides added value to the child soldiers who wield it, and who are otherwise themselves readily expendable. Agu seems to recognize that this gendered equation must also apply to his mother and sister, and he replaces those familial bonds with protective and nurturing solidarity with Strika. Agu recognizes Strika as “my brother and my family and the only person I can be talking to even if he is never talking back”99; however, their bond does not produce an alternative ending to, or a new community out of, the fable of the ox and the leopard. Strika’s death on the road “home” once the soldiers abandon any military mission they might have had completes the breakdown of social bonds and leaves Agu completely unmoored from family, village, mission, and even the fraternity of war. One of the strengths of the novel comes from Iweala’s work to reverse the gendered terms of sex and violence. The catalyst for Agu’s rejection of militarism comes from his group’s visit to a brothel where the women, far from being reduced to their most expendable form in equations of sex and death during war, insist on other forms of value. As the men disperse to private rooms, leaving Agu at the television and bar, he makes several attempts to assert his own masculinity, which the women refuse to ratify. A young woman responds to his commands, “Is this war just making you to have no respect for your elder? This small thing borned yesterday trying to order me

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52  Spectrally Human around. Enh! You this small thing. I can be your mother!”100 She brings the bread he demands, but when he tries to touch her, “she is looking at me like she will be beating me to death and sucking in her teeths so I am putting my hand down.”101 What initially reads as a check on the corruption of childhood and Agu’s attempt to violate the norms of respect is rewritten as a more powerful check on violent masculinity when another woman in the brothel fatally stabs the Luftenant when he beats her during sex, and the group retreats carrying him with the knife still plunged into his belly. The prostitutes provide an example of other courses of action for Agu that his memories and multiple perspectives cannot. After leaving the village with the brothel, the soldiers’ fortunes decline further as bombing, dying, deserting, and starving all increase. When Rambo, who has become the new Luftenant, tells the Commandant that he and the others are finished, the Commandant looks to Agu, his bodyguard, for protection. These desperate circumstances effect a shift in Agu from a soldier who is at once commanded and deadly to a boy making other choices: “I am lowering my gun,” he says, as Rambo shoots the Commandant and tells the soldiers, “WE ARE GOING HOME!”102 Once Strika dies on that journey back to a home that obviously does not exist, Agu abandons his military ties in a similar re-scripting of agency: “I am looking at my gun and I am saying to it, I am not needing you anymore. […] My shoulder that it is always sitting on is hurting so much, but I am feeling it jubilating because it is not having to be obeying gun anymore.”103 Iweala does not expand upon the productive potential of this fragmented subject who so clearly in these moments relinquishes the desire for sovereignty guaranteed by his gun. Left wandering in the dark, where at least “nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world,”104 he emerges figuratively and literally in the morning light of a Catholic rehabilitation center. As the dictates of the literary and legal Bildungsroman reassert themselves with insistence, the last chapter “promote[s] physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of […] armed conflicts” (CRC, Article 39).105 Physically restored with food, sanitation, medical care, and new clothes, Agu also receives psychosocial therapy with the help of a priest and an American aid worker, Amy, who encourages him to tell her his stories, very much to put his ghosts to rest. Amy’s humanitarianism models that of the posited reader, who should listen sympathetically to the narrative’s restoration of the whole, mature subject, even if the story cannot completely bridge the geopolitical and experiential spaces between them. “I am all of this thing,” Agu tells Amy (and the reader), with the reminder that “I am thinking I am like old man and she is like small girl because I am fighting in war and she is not even knowing what war is.”106 This conclusion secures at once Agu’s former innocence as a child (in the legal and religious sense either of not accountable for his wartime atrocities or of eligible for the “Confession and Forgiveness and Resurrection” the priest offers) and narrative authority as

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Spectrally Human  53 an adult by re-inscribing the middle-class, Christian values of his nuclear family in the only remaining available sphere, that of global humanitarian literature. Although the novel concludes in the rehabilitation center rather than beyond it, Beasts of No Nation conforms to Slaughter’s argument that “in a heavily marketized and commoditized social economy, a society of readers’ humanitarian pressure for social conformity (what it regards as liberation by enfranchisement) translates into a commercial pressure for generic conformity (liberation by literacy and publication).”107 That conformity in the novel ultimately seems to confirm Martha Minow’s argument that “[t]herapeutic purposes contrast starkly with political ones” in outcomes of atrocity.108 By way of textual conclusion, Agu’s possible rehabilitation is enough.

Song for Night: A Handbook of Mourning as Conjuration Abani actively resists the terms of this engagement. In place of literary humanitarianism, he encourages what Slaughter describes as “unlearning the self-congratulatory sense of benevolence (or noblesse oblige) that seems naturally to attend such reading acts of recognition” of the full dignity of a marginalized other.109 Rather than a narrator whose restoration to the path of full human development seems to depend on the response of a sympathetic reader/aid worker, My Luck is introduced at the point of death, or what Salgado has described in terms of life “passing through death” (original emphasis),110 beyond the scope of the Bildungsroman in literature, humanitarianism, or law. For these reasons and because the novella is as much about the work of a literary aesthetic in representing child soldiers as it is about child soldiers themselves, My Luck’s story invites considerations of vulnerability that is divorced from phenomenology as well as ­identification.111 The limbo between life and death, between the various cultural norms that shape My Luck’s understanding of his place in or out of the world, and between established narratives of childhood innocence and My Luck’s knowing voice—these intervals, in Rancière’s sense, between competing narrative temporalities that fail to cohere—provide the foundations for a profound meditation on where human rights end and other narratives of justice might begin. The story proceeds through a complicated reworking of the terms and temporalities of death and silence. As is typical in Abani’s work, themes in the novella may be traced to his work in other literary forms. In Daphne’s Lot, Abani’s poetic re-imagination of his family’s experience of the NigeriaBiafra Civil War, he writes of a seven-year old girl in a refugee camp: […] The other kids teased her constantly. But she never spoke, or fought back. When asked why, she said: Dead people have nothing to say.112

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54  Spectrally Human Song for Night reverses the ironic relationship between silence and death in the poem to explore how haunting exceeds the language to describe it, yet insists on acknowledgment of the presence (present-ness) of the past and its importance for the ethical consideration of the future. As the title suggests, the novella invites readers into a circle of mourning, but one that wards against easy sentimentality or “self-congratulatory benevolence.” In place of identification with the protagonist, the novella stages the problem of witnessing My Luck’s paradoxes as a child soldier as a problem of self-­ representation (as discussed earlier with respect to the relevant legislation) as well as of reading the voices that haunt a shared present. If “[d]eath is the thing you cannot fold into words,”113 as Abani writes in another poem, how can the conjuring and then haunting of ghosts become legible? What kinds of negotiations do they foster? Abani begins to address these questions through the interplay and undoing of silence and death made present at the limits of language. He grounds My Luck’s story loosely in history, region, and politics; however, as opposed to Tutuola, Saro-Wiwa, and Iweala, he separates that foundation from voice as a representation of authenticity. Indeed, Eleni Coundouriotis includes both Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night among the recent child soldier novels in African literature that, she argues, privilege victimhood and recovery of the protagonists over both historical agency and the stories of those who suffer at the hands of child soldiers. As opposed to the reading I offer here, which emphasizes the different approaches of the two works, Coundouriotis understands both Iweala and Abani’s work as tied to a Western paternalist project of restoring an innocent victim who stands metonymically for an immature continent.114 At once richly imagistic, spare, and elegant, Song for Night intertwines allusions from Igbo, Catholic, and Greek myths and stories to situate My Luck as child soldier (with Igbo, Catholic, and Muslim identifications) in the civil war and, through his slow death from a mine explosion, on his journey across the river of hate. The novella reaches beyond that quasi-national context, however, to present a manual of sorts to transnational mourning as conjuration. One of the persistent tropes in the novella is the imaginary manual “John Wayne” uses to train his child soldiers as he whips them into formation: “This is from the manual, the same manual that they use in West Point, the same one they use in Sandhurst; the military manual for the rules of engagement [… it is] like the rules of etiquette for war.” For John Wayne, the manual that he keeps in his head, so that “it can never be lost,” also promises that “we can never be lost as long as we follow [it].”115 John Wayne’s comments imply that the rules of engagement and the etiquette for war that are ostensibly the same in West Point, Sandhurst, and loosely Biafran context of the text, and that implication would seem to indicate support the universal principles of IHL; however, the rules of engagement and protection become perverted and absurd in this necropolitical conflict. Playing on that trope of the manual for the impossible (the jus in bello or

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Spectrally Human  55 law of war that can prevent loss), Abani opens the novella with a complementary set of directives, procedures, and conditions for reading a voice of the dead. My Luck begins with a direct address to the reader: “What you hear is not my voice.” This declaration of authorial privilege warns immediately against any appropriative desire the reader might have to identify with the narrator. In addition, it places the problem of narration of the human rights subject at the center of the story. Abani quickly compounds the meanings of what “not my voice” might signify, of the many ways in which war renders vulnerability speechless and, thus, the many ways in which the literary will intervene where testimony cannot. My Luck explains first that he has not spoken in the three years since boot camp (intimating that perhaps, like Iweala’s Strika, he has been traumatized into silence by war); that he and other child soldiers “have developed a crude way of talking, a sort of sign language that we have become fluent in” (a disingenuous suggestion, given that both his signing and commentary are overtly literary); that he and the other mine diffusers, chosen for their slightness, had their vocal cords slit to prevent them from frightening each other during explosions; and, finally, that “not my voice” is about interiority as much as silence, because “there is something about the mind’s interiority no less that opens up your view of the world.”116 The inward turn has ethical implications. The word “your” functions doubly in the sentence to address the reader and to signify the speaker’s self-reflection. It also conjures the mind’s interiority (the loss that has been taken in) in the image of an other who serves as witness to the present, a process Derrida describes as crucial to the work of mourning: “The image looks at us. This dyssymetry also inscribes […] an essential anachrony in our being exposed to the other; it dislocated all contemporaneity at the very heart of what we have our sights on at the same time.”117 The inward turn that mourning takes initiates spatial, temporal, and subjective dislocations. These dislocations destabilize fixed positions of reader and text to make possible ethical calculations that explicitly extend to those whose voices are no longer present or who were never heard. In effect, Abani poses the question of how the logic of expenditure that fuels these conflicts as well as the legal principles of justice and protection would be calculated differently if those who are spectrally human—either because they are/ were expendable or because they have perished in the conflict—were part of the equation. Song for Night does not answer that question; however, it demonstrates Abani’s literary attempt to summon one of those voices. The destabilized entanglements of time that make haunting possible extend to the failure of language to capture traumatic experience, such that the interiority does not offer the promise of complete disclosure or a counter, yet still totalizing narrative to the logic of war. Instead, Abani invites readers to risk the dangers of incomprehensibility and the impossibility of reading voices that can never be represented fully, yet still demand to be heard. This is the irruptive potential of political subjectivization.

56  Spectrally Human

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Abani never mourns the limitations of language in representing atrocity; instead, he highlights, through My Luck’s address, those limitations as foundational to the work of imaginative literature: Of course if you are hearing any of this at all it’s because you have gained access to my head. You would also know then that my innerspeech is not in English, because there is something atavistic about war that rejects all but the primal language of the genes to comprehend it, so you are in fact hearing my thoughts in Igbo. But we shan’t waste time on trying to figure all that out because as I said before, time here is precious and not to be wasted on peculiarities, only on what is essential.118 What is essential here is fiction’s ability to conjure a voice the reader is willing to attend, to bring forth the paradoxical violence and suffering of the child soldier without masking one behind the other. The urgency of My Luck’s appeal within the story becomes clear on the next page when we learn he has just come to, so to speak, after a mine blast. Not only is My Luck’s voice impossible, his embodiment is, too. With chapter titles that are both moving and ironic, such as “Silence Is a Steady Hand, Palm Flat,” “Death Is Two Fingers Sliding across the Throat,” and “Imagination Is a Forefinger between the Eyes,” what follows is an exploration of how literature “gestures the unspeakable.”119 For Abani, as for Avery Gordon in her theory of haunting, gestures function as “structures of feeling” (borrowed from Raymond Williams) that figure “the necessarily social nature of what we call the subjective; [gesture] gives notice to the texture and skin of the this, here, now, alive, active contemporaneity of our lives.”120 Significantly in Abani’s work, the task is not to script the texture of the present to be phenomenologically available to readers (what it “feels like” to be a child soldier), but rather to represent how the entanglements of temporality and subjectivity call forth an imagination of shared, embodied vulnerability. Song for Night’s contribution to that imaginative effort is precisely to avoid naturalizing its terms and instead to render them as explicitly as possible. The yearning for an authentic, embodied voice of an other is acknowledged and then denied, with an overtly lyrical and literary representation offered in its place. The language of gesture to describe the spectrally human links reason, presence, and corporeality to affect, anachrony, and imagination within what Derrida terms the “spectrapoetic.”121 For Derrida, following Marx, spectrapoetic describes the “metamorphosis of commodities [that] was already a process of transfiguring idealization”; but it is also related to conjuration as “a matter of neutralizing a hegemony or overturning some power.”122 Thus, at every juncture, Abani provides a narrative of the loss that counters the designation of expendability with a haunting return, while continually undermining assumptions of what that loss might mean and for whom.

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Spectrally Human  57 The story emerges gradually from the palimpsestic layering of journeys whose meanings proliferate through the text. For My Luck, his desire to catch up with his unit, which abandoned him for dead on the battlefield in violation of protocol, propels him forward. The Cross River marks his central passage. Abani stresses the river’s plethora of meanings, as its name and his journey invoke Greek mythology (and its rewritings in western literary epics), Igbo legend, and colonial history. Those alternative renderings of the past are reflected corporeally in the crosses he carves in his arm in what he calls “my personal cemetery,” itself imaging the Islamic and Catholic faiths of his parents (and employing the knife of “[m]y father the imam and circumciser” for one of the cuts).123 “‘Life and death are like this river,’” My Luck’s grandfather told him, and he holds onto floating corpses and rides in empty canoes, carried initially by his “undercurrent, full of a hate dark as any undertow.”124 The journey gains shape and dimension, even as its temporalities further proliferate and lose their distinction. He finds himself in key sites of violence and conscience from his past, yet the days bleed together. As he comes closer to accepting death, embodiment and sensory experience increasingly give way to ethical consideration. Meeting Ijeoma at a house where he had inadvertently shot a minister’s pregnant wife, Ijeoma tells him, “These are memories. Before we can move from here, we have to relive and release the darkness.”125 Despite all signs to the contrary—e.g., people who curse, “Tufia!” to ward off evil spirits when they see him; the appearance of Ijeoma, whose death he witnessed—My Luck refuses to countenance his own death, although he recognizes the haunting that surrounds him. At first, haunting appears figurative and literary, referencing both social death and a state of being reminiscent of the ending of Sozaboy when Mene is unrecognizable to others upon his return home. My Luck comments, “I am sure that when the war is over, many of the reported dead will stream back to their families only to be rejected as ghosts or zombies.”126 There is no social space available for child soldiers who both exemplify and instrumentalize necropolitical authority once war has ended. As his journey continues through the ghosts of his own past, however, he also must contend with other specters like himself that are haunting the land. Doing so, he intimates, will require re-activating the cultural traditions that war has destroyed not as static reminders of tradition, but as necessary, adaptable practices for the future. Despite his comment that just when we need shamans to put the dead to rest, the shamans have all become soldiers, a “native priest” named Peter appears, reminding him that “we all have to cross [this river] someday,” and conjures a canoe for the end of My Luck’s journey.127 Here the passage that began with gestures for silence and death and progressed through memory and imagination moves finally to familial love. Floating in a coffin provided by Grace—that undeserved gift that may at times provide an alternative to rights or to humanitarianism tied to stereotypes of deserving victims—he reaches the opposite shore to find Home: “a Palm Fisted to the Heart.”

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58  Spectrally Human Abani emphasizes, through gesture and the voice that is not “my voice,” the construction of My Luck and the narrative, which conclude at the opposite shore when his young mother, name, and voice are recuperated. My Luck’s return to his mother may appear to reassert a romanticized view of the family as at once private and naturalized; however, the imbrication of family dynamics and national disintegration that led to My Luck’s enlistment undermines such a reading. Instead, Abani seems to recognize the yearning for such a secure space, even as he places it beyond the scope of this lifeworld. Agu’s insistence at the end of his tale of atrocities that “I am also having mother once, and she is loving me”128 and My Luck’s reiteration of maternal love both confirm the protagonists’ humanity, a humanity that includes the capacity for violence and degradation as well as for love, care, and forgiveness. By emphasizing the human-ness of the characters and their capacity for ethical regard—notwithstanding their experiences of social abandonment, disposability, instrumentality in conflict, or even willful participation in it—both novels focus readers’ attention on the dynamic interplay of assumptions that surround child soldiers as well as their metaphoric representation of precarious life at this moment of late modernity. Ghosts, argue Derrida and Gordon, always “[figure a] utopian dimension” that gestures toward the future.129 In Derrida’s terms, specters address the implied reader’s inevitable statement, “I would like to learn to live finally,” with the reminder that “[i]f it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death.”130 Whereas Iweala ultimately locates the future in the promise, however fraught and ambiguous, of the law, Abani takes up Derrida’s challenge. Song for Night remains focused on the song itself—the potential literary aesthetics have to disrupt any imposed uni-linear form of history, narrative, or human development. The anachrony of the novella and its transpatiality, in other words, provide the moment between life and death that is otherwise unavailable for the reader who wants to learn to live. Death restores My Luck to the childhood he lost, a romanticized conclusion to be sure, but one that also underscores the impossibility of such restoration among the living. Mourning as conjuration then focuses not solely on the child soldier as victim, but on the broader circumstances that have produced him as well as on the atrocities he has committed. Mourning attends what Derrida has theorized in terms of “time out of joint,” and responsibility for both shifts from My Luck to the reader in the novella’s conclusion.131 Abani’s “spectrapoetics,” his haunting portrayal of My Luck through irony that continually defers what should be present, provide an alternative imagining of how to negotiate the terms of global literature and the terms of modernity, including the consumption of fiction about child soldiers as a something other than a particularly affective example of subaltern or postcolonial difference. Whereas Derrida locates spectrapoetics in relation to the State’s complicity with capitalism, wherein “[t]hese ghosts that are commodities transform human producers into ghosts,”132 Abani makes the

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Spectrally Human  59 process of transformation visible in a human rights context through the narrative and ethical journey of one of those ghosts. My Luck’s journey takes place in the absence of human rights law, an absence that is signified in multiple ways. In the logic of the story, My Luck is beyond the reach of the law; however, this circumstance of plot also illuminates conflicted temporalities within normative human rights and alternatives founded upon embodied vulnerability as opposed to liberal subjectivity. Inhering in normative human rights is a temporal progression from a time of barbarity, as referenced in the Preamble of the UDHR, to an impossible ideal future. Mourning attached to this narrative looks backward, but does not question the ideal of the future, which determines who is or is not grievable and depends upon the association of vulnerability with victimhood. On the other hand, as Butler effectively argues, when mourning is for the spectrally human, it forcefully calls upon a non-teleological image of the future. What I would call a critical and productive mourning necessitates the future anterior. In Butler’s terms, the future anterior states, “‘this will be a life that will have been lived’ [and] is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard.”133 My Luck is not a ghost of the future anterior; however, his haunting and the spectrapoetics that attend it disturb the neatness of the novella’s conclusion and conventional mourning for his death. My Luck, who exists and survives only in the imagination, whose Bildungsroman cannot be written, who never claims the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and, indeed, who “is no longer the citizen in the making,”134 disrupts the desire for the totalizing forms of compensation offered through the “full development of the human personality” in literature and law. Mourning as conjuration then refocalizes through My Luck as witness to the reader’s predilections as well as to My Luck’s own atrocities. In keeping with a Levinasian ethics shaped by the image of the face that is at once concrete and abstract and stands in for the “infinite ethical relation”135 to others (before identity and before will), My Luck interprets his own actions through the regard of others. These looks, moreover, constitute the most ethically challenging moments of the text. They direct attention away from a material political and historical reading of the book, as Abani’s critics have argued, and toward the problem of imagining an ethos of human rights that incorporates all the paradoxes of the child soldier rather than measures his distance from the legal ideal. To give one example, the first face My Luck recounts is one that haunts him throughout his journey. Wandering with his unit into a village wasted by war, and “armed to the teeth with AK-47s and bags of ammo and grenades mostly stolen from the better US-armed enemy soldiers,” he asks for food from a group of old women cooking over an open fire, only to discover in horror that the meal is a tiny human baby. Depravity pervades the scene: “I emptied a clip into them, as my platoon cheered at the snapping of old bones and the sigh of tired flesh even though they didn’t

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60  Spectrally Human know why I was killing the women.”136 The novella does not hierarchize a gradation of evils as the women roast the baby, My Luck fires upon them, and his platoon cheers at the sight of more violence and death. In place of the rules of war, which seems to have no meaning in the necropolitics at hand, My Luck recognizes that “[i]t is that little face, maybe a few months old, that keeps me from rest.”137 The geopolitical significance of the enemy soldiers, of ostensible reasons for fighting, fade from view, while that infinite ethical obligation to the future signified by the infant’s face persists to catalyze his story. The child’s face—the face that should be a life that will have been lived—opens up the future to imagination and negotiation; however, it does so in the a priori sense that Levinas intended, rather than in terms tethered to a particular context.

Conclusion: The Limits of Strategic Vulnerability How might a vulnerability approach to reading fiction of human rights open up the possibilities of imagining such futures, beyond the singular narrative of personal rehabilitation and, correspondingly, national development? Although they are of course just two examples of the wide range of representations of child soldiers, Beasts of No Nation and Song for Night point to the difficulties of that project. In Beasts of No Nation, the entangled foundations of Agu’s cultural belongings are gradually eroded along with the social worlds that gave them meaning. Disintegration gives way to possible reintegration in the dominant terms of psychosocial treatment made available through the character Amy. Although the novel’s conclusion is ambiguous about Agu’s outcome, as Allison Mackey argues, the text does not present the possibility of alternative futures other than the one Amy offers. In that way, she stands in for humanitarianism as an instrument of human rights juridical norms. According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Refugees, reintegration refers to a “process which enables returnees to regain the physical, social, legal and material security needed to maintain life, livelihood and dignity and which eventually leads to the disappearance of any observable distinctions vis-à-vis their compatriots.”138 Grounded in the concepts of return and regain, the definition presumes a separation between civilian and militarized spaces as well as between the temporary time of violent conflict that interrupts an otherwise persistent time of social stability. It also reasserts vulnerability as a temporary condition to be overcome. However, in the contexts that Mbembe discusses and which Iweala and Abani construct, these boundaries do not exist. “Returnees” profoundly changed by civil war or regional violence go back to villages, cities, and towns, whose inhabitants have only limited security, life, livelihood, and dignity themselves and to whom former child soldiers are at best unsettling and at worst still threatening. In novels that do focus on post-conflict societies, such as Abani’s GraceLand (2004) or Ishmael Beah’s Radiance of Tomorrow (2014), former

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Spectrally Human  61 child soldiers feature as side characters who signify the depth of destruction of social bonds and the difficulty of their reconstruction. Rooted in their respective historical contexts of contemporary Nigeria and Sierra Leone, both of these novels map protagonists’ journeys from the smaller towns and cities of their birth to their nations’ capitals in the context of the predatory effects of corruption, capitalist exploitation, and the militarization of public, ­privately owned, and familial security interests. For example, Beah’s first novel is clearly situated at the end of the eleven-year civil war, his participation in which he recounts in the bestseller, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy S­ oldier (2007). In Radiance of Tomorrow, he extends the time of embodied vulnerability from the conflict to its aftermath—when children with AK-47s and the commanders who prey on them are replaced by neoliberal predations: corporate induced poisoned water, electrocution, rape, hunger, and mining accidents. In this still-dangerous, post-conflict era, Beah tries to imagine a local alternative to the therapeutic promise articulated within IHL. In doing so, he demonstrates the importance of reading a population’s embodied vulnerability in relation to the distribution of precarity by state and non-state actors in order to formulate human rights claims. The plot details an unremitting succession of abuses that occur when the government functions as little more than a cover for foreign corporate interests, and economic development re-distributes precarity among an already vulnerable population of war survivors. This re-distribution underscores the way in which some populations remain only spectrally human across different historical moments, although of course the specific dangers faced by these populations change. Mutating forms of distributed precarity—the targeting of specific populations as necessarily or acceptably expendable to the necropolitics of failed states or the predations of neoliberalism—call for a more flexible, dynamic, and locally inflected human rights discourse than is available through IHL. Radiance of Tomorrow responds to that challenge in two ways. On the one hand, the novel productively redefines family from a social unit defined solely by marriage and generational ties to different groupings of survivors whose shared strategic vulnerability demands relationality through choice instead of targeted victimhood—e.g., the fictional town of Imperii is rebuilt as families are reconstituted in new forms: an elderly woman, young woman and her son, who is the product of his mother’s rape during the war; a group of teenagers and young adults under the direction of a young man provocatively called “the Colonel,” whose actions during the war are never explained. Moreover, Beah describes the productive social bonds of these families and the community as a whole through third person narration that echoes the cadences, rhythms, and phraseology of the author’s Mende language, and thus is itself tied to the immediate context. On the other hand, the movement of the story largely depends upon familiar tropes of good (the past represented by the elders and their stories and ties to the land) versus evil (the present characterized by capitalist exploitation and corruption), and the necessity of employing the former against the latter to achieve the

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62  Spectrally Human future promised by the novel’s title. Significantly, although child soldiers skirt the edges of the story, the focus is not on the reintegration of an individual into society but the reconstruction of the social fabric itself; although child soldiers are also woven into that process. That effort is limited, however, by the rather formulaic terms in which reconstruction is imagined. This chapter has focused on the challenge of conceptualizing a vulnerable human rights subject within fictional and juridical discourses who is neither bound by the rhetoric of victimhood nor bound to a teleological narrative of progress defined by rescue, rehabilitation, and redemption. Looking specifically at literary representations of child soldiers in relation to the implicit teleology of the Convention of the Rights of the Child and related legal instruments, I have argued that whereas the law imagines child soldiers as victims of failed states and itself as the savior, the fiction offers a more complicated reading of these paradigmatic human rights subjects, the temporalities through which they emerge, and their (im)possibilities for justice. The haunting narration of My Luck in Song for Night, in particular, most obviously reflects the recursive logic of traumatic memory; but more importantly, that haunting can be read as a product of temporal heterogeneity that unavoidably accompanies those very economic and political structures upon which normative human rights are founded. In contradistinction to the uni-directional march of progress, temporal heterogeneity makes visible the entanglements that Mbembe ascribes as a kind of diagnostic of the postcolony, as well as the productive capacity of disjointed time, according to Derrida. Abani’s play with figurative and gestural language provides an example of the disruption of a realist narration of linear and progressive history in favor of heterogeneous temporality and new forms political subjectivization; however, it ends without imagining the kind of open-ended future-to-come toward which its spectropoetics lean. By eliminating the possibility of My Luck’s reintegration into his platoon, family, or community in Song for Night, Abani does not try to resolve the work of haunting. The roasting baby haunts My Luck and My Luck haunts the narrative precisely to disturb an understanding of what is (ideologically and consistently) legible. What if, Abani seems to ask, mourning does not posit an ideal, but instead forces a reconsideration of that which has been lost? What if the ethical project for the future is not to put ghosts to rest but to engage with the forces that continually produce and reproduce the spectrally human (who will likely soon become ghosts themselves)? What if, in addition to signifying the risk of being harmed, vulnerability can also generate the capacity to harm? What if embodiment rooted in particularity leads to essentialist readings of the subject as opposed to his or her openended political potential as a subject of humanitarianism or IHL? Song for Night does not answer those questions, but it does illuminate the limitations of dominant structures that frame child soldiers in the Bildungsroman and the law, as well as of alternatives scripted through paradigms of strategic, rather than encompassing vulnerability.

Spectrally Human  63

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Notes 1. For a more extensive discussion of definitions of vulnerability in human rights legal contexts, see Morawa, “Vulnerability as a Concept in International Human Rights Law” and Timmer, “A Quiet Revolution: Vulnerability in the European Court of Human Rights.” 2. Merry, “Introduction: Conditions of Vulnerability,” 198. 3. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity, 133, 119. 4. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights, 133. 5. Hesford, “Contingent Vulnerabilities: Child Soldiers as Human Rights Subjects,” 71. 6. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 91. 7. Hawley, “Biafra as Heritage and Symbol: Adichie, Mbachu, and Iweala,” 23. 8. Maslin, “A Conscripted Soldier’s Tale from the Heart of Darkness,” E9. 9. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14–15. 10. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14. 11. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam, 8. 12. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. 13. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14 (original emphasis). 14. Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, 198. 15. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 16. 16. Ahmadou Kourouma, quoted in Singer, Children at War, 37. 17. Harlow, “Child and/or Soldier?: From Resistance Movements to Human Rights Regiments,” 209. 18. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 87. 19. Bhabha, “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1526. 20. Bhabha. “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1528. 21. Bhabha. “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1534. 22. Bhabha. “The Child––What Sort of Human?” 1527. 23. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 299. 24. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 66. 25. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 66. 26. Constable, Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts, 104. 27. Much recent criticism about contemporary child soldiers begins with a gesture toward the long history of child participation in armed conflict. P.W. Singer’s Children at War is an exception to this scholarship, as he argues that “[t]he exclusion of children from warfare has held true in almost every traditional culture” (9) and distinguishes violent from nonviolent participation in past conflicts. Barbara Harlow, meanwhile, critiques the contemporary literary fascination with the child soldiers that ignores its long political history as well as is unaccompanied by the political will to address the treatment of child soldiers such as Omar Khadr, committed to Guantánamo when he was fifteen years old (“Child and/or Soldier?: From Resistance Movements to Human Rights Regiments”). 28. For overviews of the global scope of child soldiering, see Wessells (2006), Singer (2006), and Rosen (2005). Honwana (2005) provides a more targeted analysis of African child soldiers, based on fieldwork in Mozambique and

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64  Spectrally Human Angola. Wessells notes that assumptions about child soldiers as stigmas of underdevelopment and political failing ignore the “normalization and legitimation by child soldiering by countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom which claim to protect children and to have children’s best interests at heart” while legally recruiting soldiers below age 18 into their own armed forces (17). 29. See Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa, Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2, and Wessells, “The New Face of War” (18–23). 30. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322. 31. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322. 32. Rosen, Armies of the Young, 14, 12. 33. Rosen, “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood,” 298. 34. Rosen, Armies of the Young, 12. 35. Rosen addresses the politicization of childhood and its legal implications in his final chapter, “The Politics of Age,” in Armies of the Young as well as in “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood.” 36. Mawson, “Children, Impunity and Justice: Some Dilemmas from Northern Uganda,” 141. 37. Rosen, “Child Soldiers,” 296. 38. Relevant international humanitarian law (such as the Geneva Conventions) and human rights law (such as the CRC) provides various definitions of a child and levels of protection to children in armed conflict, depending on their age, whether they serve in national or anti-national armed groups, and whether they are conscripted voluntarily or forcibly. In addition to the CRC and the Optional Protocol, the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions (1949) and the Additional Protocol Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (1977) have provisions that address children in war more broadly, and all three mandate the highest level of protection to children under the age of 15, with age 18 marking the end of childhood. The Additional Protocol, like the Convention on the Rights of the Child, allows for recruitment of soldiers between ages 15 and 18. The International Labour Organization’s Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (1999) follows the Straight–18 definition of a child, and cites “forced or compulsory recruitment of children into armed conflict” (Article 3) as one of the worst forms of child labor (a provision that does not address voluntary child service). In the United States, Senators Durbin (D-Illinois) and Brownback (R-Kansas) have introduced bill S. 1175, the Child Soldier Prevention Act of 2008. It places limits on US military assistance to countries whose government forces or government-sponsored armed groups “recruit or use” child soldiers (Section 5) and it encourages US “services to rehabilitate recovered child soldiers and reintegrate them back into their communities” (Section 4). 39. For a close look at the statutory differences between these legal instruments, see Breen, “When Is a Child Not a Child? Child Soldiers in International Law.” Breen notes the “cultural differences” that influence the definition of a child (72), though she argues ultimately for the strengthening of “age-related rights” protection for children under 18 (97–98). 40. UNICEF, Cape Town Annotated Principles and Best Practices (1997).

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Spectrally Human  65 41. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, 33. 42. For further development of this argument, see Boyden, “Childhood and the Policy Makers: A Comparative Perspective on the Globalization of Childhood” as well as Burman, “Innocents Abroad: Western Fantasies of Childhood and the Iconography of Emergencies.” 43. Stephens, “Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’,” 36. 44. Stephens, “Introduction: Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism’,” 39. 45. See also Boyden and de Berry’s “Introduction” to Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement. The focus on trauma and psychopathology, they note, “have the effect of both pathologising the survivors of the conflict and individualizing a phenomenon that is in fact profoundly political” (xiv). 46. Pupavac, “Misanthropy Without Borders: The International Children’s Rights Regime,” 100–101. 47. Pupavac, “Misanthropy Without Borders,” 102. 48. Pupavac, “Misanthropy Without Borders,” 99. 49. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 33. 50. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 30. 51. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Introduction,” 44. 52. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. 150. 53. Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Cultures, 10. 54. For his focused analysis of this narrative intersection, see Slaughter, “Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law.” This argument is expanded and extended throughout Human Rights, Inc. 55. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., Chapter 2, “Becoming Plots: Human Rights, the Bildungsroman, and the Novelization of Citizenship,” and 151. 56. Moretti, The Way of the World, 10. 57. In “Of Ancestors and Progeny,” Black Issues Book Review (November/December 2006): 24–25, Abani cites Tutuola and Saro-Wiwa as precursors for Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (25), and I extend that influence to Song for Night perhaps more than Abani himself would. For a larger discussion of that influence, see Schultheis, “Global Specters: Child Soldiers in the Post-National Fiction of Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani.” In “The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization,” Coundouriotis gives an excellent reading of the influence of Soyinka’s Season of Anomy (1974) on Iweala and Abani. 58. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322. 59. Moretti, The Way of the World, 6. 60. Moretti, The Way of the World, 6. 61. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 23. 62. Abani, Song for Night, 86. 63. Salgado, “Vanishing Points/Visible Fictions: The Textual Politics of Terror,” 217. 64. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 180, 181, 182. 65. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 15. 66. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 16.

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66  Spectrally Human 67. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, ix. 68. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 178, 168. 69. Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies,” 262. 70. Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism,” 275. 71. Chakrabarty, “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism,” 276, 262. 72. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, 9. 73. Kaiwar, “Toward Orientalism and Nativism: The Impasse of Sublatern Studies,” 218. 74. Kaiwar, “Colonialism, Difference and Exoticism in the Formation of a Postcolonial Metanarrative,” 66. 75. Butler, Precarious Life, 147. 76. Butler, Precarious Life, 22. 77. That who triumphs in the “tougher arena of high-stakes, blockbuster publishing” is central to understanding the stakes of our reading of African child soldiers is clear in the recent controversy over Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (Shelley Gare, “Africa’s War Child,” The Australian, 15 March 2008, http:// www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23074110–5016101,00. html). See, for instance, the ironically titled, “Boy Soldier of Fortune,” by Graham Rayman, The Village Voice (18 March 2008), “Disturbing Memoir Outsells Literary Comfort Food at Starbucks” (10 March 2007) B7 by Julie Bosman of The New York Times, as well as the newsbreaking reporting on the Beah story by Shelley Gare and Peter Wilson in The Australian in March 2008. 78. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 314. 79. As just one indicator, a recent WorldCat search yielded 505 libraries that have purchased Song for Night as opposed to 1348 holding Beasts of No Nation. Beasts of No Nation also received early support from Jamaica Kincaid, Iweala’s advisor at Harvard University where he first drafted the novel as his undergraduate honors thesis, and the novel was published by HarperCollins. Song for Night, by contrast, was published by Akashic Books, which has a reputation for courting alternative and African-American markets (Linda Chavers and Calvin Reid. “Five Figures: Black Book Publishing Today,” Publishers Weekly 12 December 2005, http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6290197.html). 80. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 196. 81. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 87. 82. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 83. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 84. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 195. 85. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 24. 86. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 87. Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, 62. 88. Iweala, “P.S.: Writing Beasts of No Nation,” Beasts of No Nation, 1. 89. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 307. 90. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 60. 91. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 67, 69.

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Spectrally Human  67 92. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 72. 93. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 56, 52, 48, 92, 104–5. 94. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 56. 95. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 49, 48. 96. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 322. These earlier narratives also include Christian parables with which Agu was raised. In the scene with the mother and daughter, for instance, Agu responds to the mother’s prayers by “laughing laughing because God is forgetting everybody in this country” (Iweala, 48), phrasing that at once recognizes their common citizenship and discounts it in favor of what Mbembe calls a “relationship of reciprocal negation” (“On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 326). 97. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 326. 98. Mbembe, “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” 328. 99. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 131. 100. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 111. 101. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 112. 102. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 123. 103. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 135–6. 104. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 136. 105. Iweala has contributed in more nuanced ways to efforts of the United Nations, including in an essay in Our Common Humanity in the Information Age: Principles and Values for Development (UN: Global Alliance for ICT and Development, 2007). There he argues against the promotion Western civil and political freedoms above social and economic development, noting that “[f]reedom and development go hand in hand” (32) and that “to maintain their luxuries, societies have been known to sacrifice freedom, theirs and others’” (31). 106. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 142, 140. 107. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 307. In “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives,” Allison Mackey finds more ambiguity in the novel’s conclusion, particularly in Agu’s reluctance to share his story with Amy and his sense that telling alone cannot bridge the space between Amy and his experiences; however, to me the reluctance reflects the tensions within the therapeutic process as opposed to resistance to it. 108. Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, 22. 109. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 326. 110. Salgado, “Vanishing Points,” 218. 111. For a fuller discussion of how Abani’s two novellas construct an ethos of human rights out of the temporal play between lyrical and narrative modes, see Moore and Swanson Goldberg, “‘Let Us Begin with a Smaller Gesture’: An Ethos of Human Rights and the Possibilities of Form in Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail.” 112. Abani, Daphne’s Lot, 40. 113. Abani, Dog Woman, 15. 114. Coundouriotis, “The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization,” 192. 115. Abani, Song for Night, 33, 34. 116. Abani, Song for Night, 19, 20, 21.

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68  Spectrally Human 17. Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” The Work of Mourning, 160. 1 118. Abani, Song for Night, 21. 119. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 150. 120. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 199. Gordon turns to Williams here to emphasize fiction’s ability to render the past, present, and future active social processes, rather than static temporal moments. 121. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45. 122. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 45, 47. 123. Abani, Song for Night, 70, 38. 124. Abani, Song for Night, 45–46. 125. Abani, Song for Night, 104. 126. Abani, Song for Night, 50. 127. Abani, Song for Night, 113–14. 128. Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, 142. 129. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 183. 130. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xvii, xviii. 131. In his reading of Hamlet’s lamentation of “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!”, Derrida finds tragedy in Hamlet’s refusal to accept the responsibility, stemming from his birth, for the law as well as in the law itself as a tool of vengeance (Derrida, Specters of Marx, 20–21). 132. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 156. 133. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? 15. 134. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 36. 135. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, x. 136. Abani, Song for Night, 28. 137. Abani, Song for Night, 29. 138. ReliefWeb Glossary of Humanitarian Terms (August 2008), 46.

2 Disturbing the Archive

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Human Rights Storytelling of Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi

Today, no one would tell their story. It is dangerous even to mourn them. Chenjerai Hove, Shadows

Normative human rights are embedded in multiple, conflicting temporalities: ostensibly timeless, they are applicable only in particular instances; responding to past violations, they are aspirational of impossible futures. On one hand, human rights discourse is often constructed around a narrative trajectory of linear, modern development paralleled by the journey from violation to testimony to adjudication and, possibly, recovery, restoration, compensation, or healing of some sort. On the other hand, that twinned narrative of the individual and/as the liberal subject of rights is haunted by the shadow of atrocity and of subjects negatively constructed within or excluded from the law. In her updated introduction to Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon defines haunting as “one way in which abusive powers make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied.”1 According to that definition, haunting draws its power from the disruptive presence of the oppressive or abusive past in the present, and it signals the instability of a projected future. As the presence of what is ostensibly anomalous to the civilizational narrative of development, haunting discloses the heterotemporality of history and, correspondingly, the internal paradox of human rights as a modern discourse: the paradox that, in Jasbir Puar’s formulation, “the civilizing apparatus of liberation is exactly that which delimits the conditions of its possibility.”2 Early in Specters of Marx, Derrida writes that “haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar.”3 Haunting thus has the ability to disrupt the narrative of historical linearity and progress that is implicit in normative human rights’ conceptual apparatus. However, haunting’s disruptive potential often carries with it romantic overtones of redemptive memory and political resistance. Building on the previous chapter’s discussion of how haunting destabilizes the liberal

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70  Disturbing the Archive subject of human rights, this chapter considers how haunting takes the form of historical residues and memories that disrupt the triumphalist claims of the liberation and security of the modern, postcolonial nation-state. The previous chapter analyzed the difficulty of separating the vulnerable, political subject who is also a perpetrator from the victim of violations in the case of child soldiers. In the present chapter, the focus shifts to specific conditions of precarity—the postcolonial state’s strategic distribution of vulnerability among its specific populations—to consider how theorizations and representations of precarity can inform alternative histories with political potential, as well as how reading only for disruption and resistance contains its own limitations. In place of an alternative history tied to specific identity categories, I read for the ways in which fiction might enable the imagination of ways of being and doing that hegemonic historiography forecloses. Central to this inquiry is the form in which precarity is represented as well as the gender coding of representations within different forms. This chapter considers the relationship between two forms of human rights storytelling— the human rights report and the novel—in representing and responding to the state-sponsored violence in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands, Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: a report into the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980–1988, authored by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJPZ) and Legal Resources Foundation was initially released in 1997 and was republished as Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe (2008). The report gives a detailed accounting of the range of atrocities committed against civilians by both government-sponsored forces and dissidents in the years just after national liberation and the inauguration of black majority rule, and in the struggle for political control. Maintaining a tone of facticity and objectivity in keeping with its ethos, the human rights report nonetheless delves into the larger historical context of the “disturbances” (including the colonial past and white minority government before liberation, the struggle between ­Zimbabwe’s two main political parties, and the ongoing political interference by South Africa) and offers recommendations for the future. The n ­ ovels— Chenjerai Hove’s Shadows (1991), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), and James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now (2009)—­imagine the violence from the perspective of those who directly suffered it, as well as of historians working to shape Zimbabwe’s protean national identity. Although their literary approaches differ, all three authors explore the literary challenge of representing communal atrocity in the face of official impunity for the crimes that were committed. In addition, all three consider the future stakes of incorporating atrocity into acknowledged history. President Robert Mugabe’s official rhetoric consistently reinforces his violent imposition of a singular, anti-colonial nationalism and only euphemistically acknowledges how he used the Gukurahundi—a Shona word meaning “the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains”—to consolidate power by terrorizing what he considered to be the

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Disturbing the Archive  71 rural population base of his political opposition. In contrast, the human rights report and the novels clearly disturb the official archive of sovereign power and nationalism. Together the human rights report and the novels not only give voice to the atrocities of 1980–1990, from national independence to the lifting of the colonial-born State of Emergency, with particular focus on the events of 1983–87; they also detail the casualties suffered by civilians at the hands of the government-sponsored, North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, other government forces, as well as dissidents acting alone or with the support of South Africa. Finally, both the report and the fiction illuminate the ongoing impunity of the perpetrators of these atrocities. Through this emphasis on impunity and the continuation of corruption it breeds, the texts underscore political change as an urgent, delicate task for the future; however, they are also often ambivalent about political subjectivity as the fullest expression of their characters’ desires and experiences. The violence inherent in nation-building has historically been sublimated within normative structures and discourses of human rights. As Ariella Azoulay argues recently with reference to principles in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, “Human rights discourse served as the mechanism for distinguishing state violence from other kinds of violence, and the establishment of the United Nations was instrumental in making the nation-state the only desirable and acceptable political model.”4 How, then, can human rights writing—writing that addresses either subjects of gross violations and/or their claims—contribute to an alternative discourse that recognizes violence that is foundational to the state and also remain open-ended about national futures beyond the corrupted nationalist discourse of the postcolonial moment? What is the relationship between the ways that the past is remembered, archived, and incorporated into the social imaginary, on the one hand, and the future toward which it gestures, on the other? To what extent can representations of atrocity shift the terms of national belonging? In his essay, “Archive Fever,” Derrida underscores the way in which “archivization produces as much as it records the event.”5 Because archivization is guided by principles or rules of selection and structure, an archive has a narrative logic that reinforces a particular historiography. Exposing the logic of the archive opens it up to scrutiny and, thus, to the possibility of heterogeneous histories and, therefore, futures. Heterogeneity and anachrony, Derrida insists, hold the potential for justice: “I have […] tried to situate justice, the justice which exceeds but also requires the law, on the side of the act of memory, of resistance to forgetting, whether this be of the injunction in general or of its place of assignation: other people, living or dead.”6 This idea of the archive as a site of negotiation over the law and its limits, as well as over how the past is constructed and the implications of that construction on the future, aptly captures the goals of this chapter in bringing different kinds of human rights writing into conversation with one another: first, to examine briefly how Mugabe deploys the rhetoric of ongoing, anti-colonial struggle in service to patriarchal, heroic nationalism

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72  Disturbing the Archive and an oppressive state built on Shona hegemony over both Ndebele and white minorities; second, to analyze the terms through which the human rights report, in the context of other reportage, defines imposed precarity and bodily vulnerability during the Gukurahundi; and, third, to analyze the novels’ attention to subaltern voices, counter-histories, and the gendered dynamics of power in imagining the relationship between precarity in the past and national belonging in the future. Judith Butler has recently considered “the possibility for precarity to be mobilized” in resistance to state policies that quite literally target specific populations.7 As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, when the vulnerability everyone shares by virtue of embodied existence, intercorporeality, and the relationality of social life is transformed into particular conditions of distributed and imposed precarity, vulnerability within normative human rights discourse often collapses into victimhood. Especially when precarity results from deliberate state action, “targeting and protecting are practices that belong to the same rationale of power,” both of which disenfranchise and imperil vulnerable subjects.8 Several critics have focused on the difficulty in theorizing political community in relation to Butler’s concept of precarious life because of this easy slippage from vulnerability to victimhood. The danger of that slippage is found in normative representations of distant suffering, as many have demonstrated, but more importantly for the argument here it also arises in Butler’s earlier writing from the primary role she ascribes to violence in defining vulnerability and political community. To cite but one passage, she writes in Precarious Life about “political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions.”9 The question her critics raise that is relevant here, is whether political community can have a basis outside those conditions of violence and vulnerability, particularly if vulnerability is defined primarily as exposure to violence that is intrinsic to social life. Àngela Lorena Fuster, for example, argues that by making political community dependent upon the primary association of vulnerability with exposure to “grief, to death, to loss […]—Butler misses the opportunity of making the most of the rethinking of the common […] in which politics find meaning in the concepts of interdependency and worldliness. She misses this chance of thinking the community in terms of difference […].”10 Similarly, Moya Lloyd notes that if subjectivity is defined so substantively by one’s exposure to violence and the work of mourning, the results could just as easily be privatizing or directed toward self-preservation (violent or otherwise) as toward non-violent political coalitions and resistance.11 Butler’s recent work attempts to address these important critiques by emphasizing two key facets of vulnerability theory: first, the positive modes of relationality such that “vulnerability cannot be associated exclusively with injurability”; and, second, the strategic use of vulnerability for a politics to “make the feminist claim effectively that such state institutions [that

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Disturbing the Archive  73 provide social welfare] are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that re-instate and naturalize relations of inequality.”12 Fuster’s and Lloyd’s caveats about the potential of vulnerability theory to ground political challenges to oppressive state and economic policies, as well as Butler’s implicit response, shape my understanding of why rethinking the archive (and including cultural production in addition to the normative political and human rights reportage) around the Gukurahundi can be useful. Whereas the dominant history of repression and impunity has served and continues to serve the interests of the state against its many perceived opponents, including women, Ndebele citizens, white landowners, and members of the political opposition, my goal is not to posit a counter-archive of victim’s testimonies and stories. Instead, I want to lay bare different processes of archive-building, in history, testimony, and fiction, in order to broaden the range of voices included to be sure, but more centrally to open up readings of possible futures to which the archive points. As the Comaroffs conclude their analysis of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “The production of an archive […] in the service of victim’s rights poses a problem for historians and political activists everywhere.”13 The stories that have been suppressed by a violent state need to become part of the archive without masking the process of archivization, in order to open up negotiation about the future. To begin, what Horace Campbell terms Mugabe’s “patriarchal model of liberation”14 depends upon a singular, if unstable, nationalist narrative that instrumentalizes gender and ethnic difference as technologies of power and is often played out violently on bodies marked by those differences. Thus, Mugabe’s nationalist rhetoric attempts to suture diverse elements of a multi-ethnic, geopolitically dynamic past into a singular narrative of linear national development culminating in Zimbabwe’s liberation. Gender and racial difference provide the threads of that narrative, in that official rhetoric continually re-stages the essential feminization of the land and the masculinization of Mugabe’s rule to free and protect the nation from white, colonial, and neocolonial domination—notwithstanding Mugabe’s embrace of international capital when necessary to maintain his own sovereign power. Disturbing the archive reveals the exclusionary practices that sustain a violently oppressive nationalist agenda (most often turned against political opponents, ethnic minorities, and women). Focusing on representations of the period just after Mugabe gained power, I examine the multiple formats of the human rights report, Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, to demonstrate how it not only exposes the scope of the violence committed upon civilians in order to consolidate his rule, it also demonstrates the difficulty of defining and deploying precarity in a human rights discourse without simultaneously reproducing de-politicized representations of (feminized) victimhood. The recent re-publication of the report also reflects the ways in which rights discourse can become sublimated to historiography. Finally, I turn to fictional representations of precarity during

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74  Disturbing the Archive the Gukurahundi that, in Derrida’s terms, “excee[d] but also require[e] the law” in order to analyze the ways in which they imagine the link between the past and the possibility of non-teleological and heterogeneous futures. One question raised by virtue of the novels’ forms is whether those pasts and futures can be imagined in collective or only individual terms. Their differences in voice and perspective notwithstanding, both Hove and ­Kilgore work to represent a collective consciousness of those who suffered the Gukurahundi; however, Vera’s novel yields more ambiguous conclusions as the future remains tied to specific characters’ individual trajectories.

Anti-Colonial, Patriotic Nationalism In her excellent discussion of the historiographic debate over Zimbabwean national development and its relationship to war fiction, Eleni C ­ oundouriotis notes how the spotlight on nationalism can leave human rights concerns in the shadows. She calls for a privileged place for fiction to redress that imbalance: “Thus heeding the narrative of the people embedded in Zimbabwe’s war fiction can reclaim the human rights narrative entangled in this history and complicate in necessary ways the meaning of the struggle for the people’s independence.”15 In the official history of independence promulgated by the Mugabe government, liberation is the successful expression of a constant, cohesive struggle against the forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism, figured primarily through racial difference, and most often presented through the chronology of three chimurengas, the Shona term for “wars of liberation”: the 1896 uprising against Cecil Rhodes and the British colonizers; the war for independence and black majority rule, 1964–79; and, from roughly 2000 to 2008, the “fast-track” land seizures and political crackdowns authorized by the Mugabe government against its local political opponents and white landowners.16 In patriotic history, the three chimurengas result from the collective ideological consciousness (thereby masking internal political conflicts) and the “will of the masses,” including the rural poor. “War,” as Mxolisi R. Sibanyoni writes in the context of Hove’s earlier novel, Bones, which aligns with this official history, “is not only depicted as a unifying force, where everyone realised their selfhood in the body of the new post-independent nation, but is also seen as one of the final stages of the social evolution, a development from an ancient organic society to a modem nation.”17 The intranational violence of the 1980s, by contrast, falls outside of the narrative of history as chimurenga, although the official rhetoric couches the campaign in the protective language of maintaining the fragile unity of the new nation against rogue threats. The Gukurahundi campaign resulted from Mugabe’s exploitation of rifts in the struggle for independence and black majority rule between his own, primarily Shona, ZANLA/ZANU political and military forces and those of his Ndebele rival Joseph Nkomo (who led the ZIPRA/Z party and force) to impose one-party rule through ZANU-PF. As Zimbabwe’s first fully elected

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Disturbing the Archive  75 prime minister, Mugabe contracted the North Korean military to train the notorious Fifth Brigade (5B in the human rights report) in ostensibly attacking armed dissidents but also, in conjunction with other military branches, in terrorizing and/or starving civilian populations in M ­ atabeleland and parts of the Midlands, regions with primarily Ndebele populations (as opposed to his Shona base). Civil disturbances and crimes committed by dissidents sponsored by the South African government under Operation Drama as well as those acting alone provided an initial rationale for government intervention, although the category of dissidents expanded to include “those who objected to the new political order […] and conveniently identified as ethnic Ndebele.”18 From 1982 to the deployment of the Fifth ­Brigade in 1983 and the imposition of the food embargo in 1984 (which also included a redeployment of the Fifth Brigade and a shift in its methods of operation) to the Unity Accord of 1987, in which Nkomo pledged support to M ­ ugabe’s government through the formation of ZANU-PF, ­Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe lists over 3,000 dead or missing, far more than 680 homesteads destroyed, at least 10,000 detained, and approximately 2,000 tortured.19 The report underscores that these numbers are only a partial representation of the violence; indeed, Archbishop Pius Ncube states in his Foreword to the 2007 edition that over 20,000 people, primarily “innocent, unarmed civilians,” were killed during this period.20 When forced to respond to the evidence of his direct responsibility for the atrocities reported in Breaking the Silence in 1997, Mugabe significantly chose a national funeral for an opposition leader at Heroes’ Acres,21 the foremost monument of postcolonial Zimbabwe, for the occasion. In this context, he substituted his own willingness to mourn a rival politician for the kind of national recognition of and critical (political) mourning for the history of their differences that the report implicitly demands. As reported by The Sunday Mail, at the funeral Mugabe criticized the CCJPZ for its work: “If we dig up history, then we wreck the nation […] and we tear our people apart into factions, into tribes.”22 Here Mugabe differentiates between a tribal past and a modern nation–state in which ethnic differences have been violently suppressed. Although the specific occasion of the funeral reminds the public of political divisions and potentially their costs, those interruptions of a seamless national narrative are rhetorically resolved through the layered imagery and ritual of the proper burial of differences past and present. In that equation, digging up, rather than putting to rest, the past is both inappropriate and dangerous. Echoing Ernest Renan’s noteworthy and convoluted formulation of a nation as a group that “has to have forgotten” many things,23 Mugabe continued, “The register or record will remind us what never to do. If that was wrong, if that went against the sacred tenets of humanity, we must never repeat it.”24 In this statement, he invokes the archive as at once crucial to the production of hegemony and always bearing with it what Derrida describes as “the trouble of troubled and troubling affairs.”25 Admitting only conditional responsibility (“if that

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76  Disturbing the Archive was wrong”) for atrocities that he insists must only be registered, if at all, euphemistically, in officially approved ways, Mugabe foreclosed the possibility of heterogeneous narratives of the past precisely because of what they might mean for the future. Mugabe substituted the official mourning of a rival who no longer poses any threat, staged to highlight Mugabe’s own magnanimity, for familial, local, and/or national mourning of atrocities committed in the name of the nation. In this way, he also adapted a tactic used by the Fifth Brigade during the Gukurahundi for rhetorical effect: according to R ­ ichard Werbner, “in a practice of psychological warfare established during the guerrilla war, the Fifth Brigade deliberately stopped the proper burial and mourning through which people are expected to cope with bereavement,” and even years later local commemoration ceremonies and markers were banned.26 The substitution of triumphant nationalism—whether violently imposed, legally encoded, or simply rhetorical—over the documentation of its costs suggests that, in this case, Butler’s theory of the political potential of critical mourning bears weight. Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe draws on earlier (suppressed) human rights reports, survivor interviews, reportage, and secondary witness testimony. By refusing to admit these other voices into the official archive, Mugabe attempted to enforce a singular narrative of the modern nation that finds its promise in his rule. At the same time, the official state funeral as the site of his response to the CCJPZ’s work raises the key question of this chapter of the relationship between mourning and political community. Mugabe clearly sought to tamp down the political potential of the report by locating his response in an event that was staged to appear above politics, so to speak, as opposed to holding a press conference, releasing an official comment, or charging the judicial branch with a mandate to respond to the report’s findings. Thus, the response at Heroes’ Acres aimed to substitute the consideration of the politics of precarity that determined both the forms of violence employed during the Gukurahundi and its targets with de-politicized sentiment of national mourning tied to a universal vulnerability to death and loss.

Human Rights Reporting Prior to the distribution of Breaking the Silence, there was little public discussion of the Gukurahundi. International readers first learned of escalating violence through exposés by white Zimbabwean Peter Godwin, writing for The Sunday Times (London), and British journalist and editor Donald ­Trelford writing for The Observer April 8–15, 1984. With the headlines “Mass murder in Matabeleland: the evidence” and “Stench of death everywhere in Mugabe’s siege of Matabeleland,” Godwin’s stories broke the nineweek press embargo of the region and included interviews with witnesses and victims of the violence as well as a visit to the Bhalagwe death camp and the Antelope mine where the army disposed of bodies of the dead.27

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Disturbing the Archive  77 The Sunday Times reprinted portions of the story twenty-five years later, as a reminder of Mugabe’s long tenure of abusive rule. In his memoir, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, Godwin provides a fuller description of his initial coverage of the Gukurahundi, beginning with the anonymous “old lady” who arrived “wearing the candy-striped pinafore of a hospital cleaner” at his Newsfile office and pleaded, “‘I[t] has started again—the killing in Matabeleland. This time it is in the south. […] You must write about this thing in your newspaper, otherwise it will never stop until all of us are killed.”28 Godwin followed up with a covert journey, much of it spent dressed as a priest, to the region and a narrow escape once his presence became known. After the publication of three articles in The Sunday Times, he was forced to flee the country: “I was declared an enemy of the state, persona non grata in my own home.”29 Godwin’s reporting and retelling of the events of 1984 not only recount his forced departure from Zimbabwe as a central event in his own life narrative, but also—particularly in his three national–personal memoirs, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1986), When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa (2006), and The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (2010)—position the Gukurahundi as an early, crucial indication of the government abuses of rights and the national economic ruin that would follow. Donald Trelford’s coverage during the same period also created controversy. Trelford went to Zimbabwe to interview Mugabe on the fourth anniversary of independence and then managed to sneak into Matabeleland and dodge his minder long enough to gather witness testimony of atrocities that corroborated Godwin’s reporting. When Trelford’s story ran in The Observer, Tiny Rowland, chief executive of Lonrho, the conglomerate that owned the paper and “perhaps the most influential foreign executive doing business” in Zimbabwe, according to the Washington Post,30 condemned the reporting, calling it “discourteous and wrong.” Reflecting his close economic ties with Mugabe despite Mugabe’s anti-(neo)colonial rhetoric, Lonhro threatened to dismiss Trelford, notwithstanding the condition agreed to in the purchase of the paper that “the editor of The Observer shall retain control over any political comment published in the newspaper and shall not be subject to any restraint or inhibition in expression of opinion or in reporting news that might directly or indirectly conflict with the opinion or interest of any of the proprietors of The Observer.”31 Like Godwin and The Sunday Times (London), Trelford has revisited the massacres and the controversy, particularly in 2000 during a brief period of political flux, in hopes of adding to the momentum of documentation that could “hasten [Mugabe’s] overthrow.”32 Within Zimbabwe, the press blackout at the time ensured that news of the massacres, abuse, and starvation was relayed primarily in whispers, although the national newspapers, including Bulawayo’s The Chronicle, provided ample coverage of dissident violence and of “the opinions and pronouncements of Government office bearers as events unfolded.”33 The

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78  Disturbing the Archive national media amplified the sense of fear and national instability attributed to dissident violence in order to provide a rationale for militarized nationalism that turned political opponents into targets. Over the same period and in keeping with the policy of silencing news of the state’s violent campaign against a portion of its citizenry in the name of security, the government suppressed human rights reports of violence and intimidation in the region, including the Dumbutshena Report (commissioned in 1981) and the Chihambakwe Committee report (commissioned in 1984). The commissioning and then suppressing of these reports suggests ongoing pressure the government faced to find means of containing representations of the ­Gukurahundi: it demanded representation; however, all representations outside of the official narrative of national security were banned. Not surprisingly, the combination of silence and official history fail to contain their contents. In a Derridean reading of the Anglophone imperial literary archive that should construct Englishness yet is always already in a process of decomposition, Trevor Hope analyzes “the manner in which the archive works against the ideal of a singular and integrated structure, and the ways in which the archive, while appearing to coordinate a regularity of signifying practices into a unified corpus, also and in principle subverts its own ideal unity.”34 Similarly, the rhetoric of national security, which would explain the Gukurahundi in terms of a fragile and new nation’s defense against primarily foreign subversive elements—as well as through naturalized, metaphoric language—cannot adequately account for the atrocities committed against citizens the new government has pledged to protect. Perhaps ironically, Mugabe’s strategy of relying on the state occasion (the funeral at Heroes’ Acres) and the official discourse of human rights (in the two commissioned reports), both of which normatively serve as proof of the legitimacy of the state, repeatedly fail to confirm the image of the state as the expression of the people’s undifferentiated will. In addition, the imploding archive fails to secure the singular narrative of the state’s triumphant emergence against the forces of colonialism and outside interference. Breaking the Silence has an evidentiary and political function. The report organizes forensic and testimonial evidence of atrocity into an implicit demand for legal, political, and economic justice, although it stops short of directly demanding legal or economic reparations. It explicitly seeks official acknowledgment of the violence against civilians, perpetrated largely along ethnic lines, and reconciliation among Ndebele and Shona, rather than among black and white Zimbabweans. Addressed to human rights activists and legal scholars, in many ways it fulfills the narrative expectations of this “classic human rights document” with a “catalogue of horrible catastrophes visited on individuals” and a “diagnostic epilogue” in the form of final sections on implications and recommendations based on its findings.35 These recommendations include publicizing the report as well as the suppressed Chihambakwe Commission report (1984) throughout the country, an official government response, and a “nationwide discussion, involving

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Disturbing the Archive  79 all ethnic groups […] to promote reconciliation amongst all the peoples of Zimbabwe.”36 The new edition, published within Columbia University Press’s African Studies series, casts a wider net in terms of readership, but it also suggests a shift in the temporal and spatial context of the ­Gukurahundi. Instead of documenting a recent crisis for Zimbabweans in order to support various human rights claims, the second edition is framed in terms of a historical review from beyond the nation’s borders. Whereas Breaking the Silence, first released in 1997, emphasizes the relevance of the report to contemporary politics and the future of national cohesion, the paratextual frames of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe position it a decade later as essential to a retrospective evaluation of Mugabe’s rule. As Stephen Chan writes in a blurb on the back cover, “This is a powerful book of testimony and truth about the first great tragedy of Zimbabwe’s independence—though not the last. It is a moving work and one that will always speak to the legacy of Robert Mugabe.”37 The shift from the temporal address of Breaking the Silence to that of its re-publication reflects the passage of time, of course, but also a change in its intended audience from Zimbabweans who have never fully acknowledged the Gukurahundi to historians who already anticipate the end of Mugabe’s long rule. Especially within Zimbabwe, the 1999 summary report of Breaking the Silence gave wide distribution to the scale of what international journalists and unofficial reports of the violence had partially disclosed. The summary states its rationale as follows: People who live in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands know only too well what happened to them during the 1980s. Their lives were affected in serious ways by both Government troops and also by dissidents and Youth Brigades at this time. However, most people from other parts of Zimbabwe still have no idea what it was like for those who were suffering. They have no idea how people still suffer as a result of the violence that took place. People who were affected also do not have ways of talking to people in other parts of the country about what happened. Ordinary people all over Zimbabwe need to know what happened during those years in their own country.38 The tone and tense of the introduction emphasize the continued relevance of these events fifteen years earlier to contemporary Zimbabweans and, thus, the need for a discursive framework and public sphere for airing the stories of civilian persecution. The imperative that people “need to know” insists that suffering caused by the post-independence violence of the 1980s can only be mourned—alleviated or consoled, redeemed nationally, or ­transmuted—through its restoration to a national discursive public sphere; moreover, the summary report insists that public dialogue must ensue in order to build a more cohesive nation. To the challenge of finding “ways of

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80  Disturbing the Archive talking” about the Gukurahundi, the report provides a sanctioned language for primary and secondary witnessing, thereby incorporating them into the narrative of the nation, despite the inherent critique of nationalist politics they convey. This discursive foundation along with the initial title, “Breaking the Silence,” capture the link between narration and the law inasmuch as, in Joseph Slaughter’s words, “a human rights abuse is characterized as an infringement on the modern subject’s ability to narrate her story,”39 such that to tell one’s story is (necessary) to make a claim for rights. The human rights report provides the common language—albeit that of the authors as opposed to the victims—through which those violated become recognizable as legal persons as well as full citizens of Zimbabwe. The summary of Breaking the Silence takes great care to situate itself discursively in relation to the voices it represents. In contrast to the evidentiary status of the case studies and summary data tables in other sections of the full report and the book—documentation which could perform a legal function, Part One “tells the history of the 1980s in Zimbabwe, written as a general story” based on “human rights reports, histories by others, Government sources, and The Chronicle newspaper.” The cheaper production and distribution costs of the summary in addition to its translations into Ndebele and Shona increased the accessibility promised by the “general story”: as the report promises, “In this way, people in affected regions can read how their history has been told, and people in unaffected regions can learn about it for the first time.”40 Rather than apportion blame or provide factual evidence of particular events, the “general story” attempts to provide a broad discursive foundation to enlarge the scope of, participation in, and audience for the narrative of Zimbabwe as an independent nation–state. Moreover, the “general story” begins the process of re-writing national identity to divorce it from an exclusionary patriotism that favors Shona over Ndebele Zimbabweans. Finally, it draws attention to the heterogeneity of the Gukurahundi’s historiographic representations. The “general story” of the summary report provides a narrative based on discursive participation that prefigures political agency to enlarge a democratic public sphere and thus work toward a more inclusive national identity. The shift in the 2007 edition to retrospective re-evaluation manifests in Elinor Sisulu’s new introduction, in which she acknowledges her own complicity in the silences surrounding these events: “At the time many of us were too enamoured of our great liberation hero to allow ourselves to confront all the evidence of his direct complicity” in “the campaign of mass murder in the Matabeleland hinterland.”41 In this edition, the report’s political potential is explicit and is directed against the culture of impunity that Mugabe has cultivated throughout his long rule. Ethical and political obligation thus entails a renewed commitment to principles of political inclusion, transparency, and judicial autonomy. Because the human rights report as a distinct genre is directed toward political, legal, and civilian audiences and its validity depends upon facticity

Disturbing the Archive  81 and the reputation of its authors,42 it typically exhibits three distinct characteristics as defined by Ron Dudai:

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1 Letting facts speak for themselves; 2 An informal ban on using adverbs and adjectives; 3 Exclusion of all interpretative frameworks apart from international human rights law.43 These rhetorical strategies and formal characteristics are often interspersed with photographs and brief excerpts from anonymous victim testimony, through which emotional immediacy and visual evidence amplify the unequivocal sense of crisis and reliability. Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe conforms to the first two characteristics of the genre, through its focus on facts and non-emotional tone, with detailed attention to methodology and reporting mechanisms, maps and graphs, and carefully coded lists of violations. It also includes extensive historical background to contextualize the violence; and Parts Three and Four, respectively, document current economic, political, and emotional costs of the violence and make policy recommendations. A typical entry on the violations themselves includes source of data, place, date, victim’s gender and age, reported crime, and alleged perpetrator. KEPANYANE (approx. 5 km W of Kepane) FEB 1983: Villagers were rounded up by 5B and all beaten, men and women. One woman was raped. The older people were then ordered to go home, and the younger adults were shot. Shooting was heard for some time. Names of four dead. (2436–37, 2446, 3329–30) Dead: 4 Raped: 1 Beaten: 50 estimated44 Richard A. Wilson describes how, to pursue a report’s goal of mobilizing domestic and international legal and political audiences, “occurrences are universalized, that is, they are represented in human rights reports in such a way that the event can be comprehended by readers on the other side of the globe.”45 In effect, a human rights report functions as an archive of the event whose reliability is tied to conventions of facticity and abstraction. Thus, Wilson explains, this process of archivization does not simply provide a standard language for actionable offenses; rather, the “category of ‘human rights violation’ does not exist independently of its representation in human rights reports.”46 Individualized suffering is, by formal convention, decontextualized in the presentation of a pattern of human rights abuses, and the pattern itself highlights certain forms of violation over others. This pattern also constructs a class of persons who have been violated and thereby maps the distribution of precarity across an abstracted population.

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82  Disturbing the Archive In the Zimbabwe report, for example, numbers of those dead, missing, raped, detained, physically tortured, and whose property was destroyed are carefully tabulated, although instances of psychological torture were “so widespread, no attempt has been made to quantify [them].”47 Similarly, the report makes clear in its extensive narrative sections that the so-called “disturbances” in the region consisted of two distinct conflicts whose differences were elided by the government: that of dissidents versus police and military forces and, secondly, of Zapu supporters and Ndebele citizens targeted by the Fifth Brigade as well as by security and intelligence forces. Whereas those two patterns of offenses emerge from the summary data in the report, other forms of suffering and privation, including starvation from the punitive food embargo and water rationing in the south (exacerbated by a lengthy drought), leave few footprints in data alone.48 Hence, the features that define the genre and make it effective in promoting political or legal action do so through an unavoidably selective presentation of the scope of human rights abuse. The universalized language of the human rights report typically produces a framework for the liberal subject’s claim to rights, yet it does so paradoxically by “construct[ing] the category of ‘victim’” on whose behalf the report speaks.49 The kind of vulnerability approach that might dislodge the centrality of the liberal subject as legal person emerges in both editions of the Gukurahundi human rights report in that they are infused with a sense of mourning. As Judith Butler has carefully demonstrated, mourning provides one means of ascribing value to lives otherwise dismissed as expendable in service to larger political goals. At the same time, her approach raises the question how potential mourners are constructed as a category and whether so much political weight should rest on them. Whereas Butler argues for mourning to disrupt antagonisms that fuel war, particularly in distributions of concern from the powerful upon the powerless, in the human rights report, mourning is presented as the collective work of the nation. In the Gukurahundi report, mourning does not simply denote the value of lives lost or diminished; instead, it shapes political history, in that mourning is linked to the long history of the nation as opposed to a clearly delimited and short-term crisis. The report’s insistence on the necessity of mourning and revaluation, in other words, does not indicate a temporary aberration in national history. Instead, it underscores the violence as constitutive of sovereignty’s ongoing illegitimacy, as opposed to violence that is excused in the name of nation-building. As Sisulu emphasizes in her introduction, “The report points out that one of the most painful aspects of the G ­ ukurahundi massacres was that the plight of the victims and survivors was and continues to be unacknowledged. They are still suffering from the wounds of silence.”50 The original introduction notes as well that during the interview process “[m]any wept, or expressed anger, or voiced confusion as to why the violence of the 1980s ever took place” and that “for thousands of people, these wounds have never healed: people still suffer today, physically,

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Disturbing the Archive  83 psychologically, and practically as a result of what they experienced in the 1980s” (original emphasis).51 In his formidable study, The Ethics of Mourning, R. Clifton Spargo identifies inconsolable mourning when expressed publicly or politically as the “most persistent sign of a dissent from conventional meanings” as well as a “persistent sign of a dedication to the time and realm of the other.”52 The “other” in this case comprises those perceived to be oppositional to Mugabe’s anti-colonial nation-building project—or those who oppose Mugabe himself, considered to be one and the same as far as he and his supporters are concerned. In this respect, the report’s emphasis on inconsolable grief underscores the Gukurahundi’s ongoing political relevance and the need for heterogeneous narratives of national belonging in the face of Mugabe’s attempted erasure of so many kinds of citizens in the “new” Zimbabwe. The continued relevance of the report to Zimbabwean national politics and to understanding Mugabe’s legacy speaks to the still-under-­ acknowledged losses of the victims and survivors, whose suffering haunts the national imaginary and presages future violations. The process of critical mourning enabled by the report (and expanded upon by the fiction) also incorporates an ethical engagement with the past, mediated in this case through the report’s formal structures and language, which calls for political accountability in order to make possible a more just future. In other words, ignoring the report would constitute what Spargo describes as “the injustice potentially perpetrated by the mourner against the dead as a failure of memory stands for the injustice that may be done to the living other at any given moment.”53 Despite the report’s injunction that Mugabe’s legacy of impunity can only be countered by opening the archive to the representation of atrocity, the report also references its own omissions. These include evidentiary gaps (due largely to the passage of time, resource limitations, and the prior destruction of records) as well as the shame of bystanders and the lasting culture of impunity that continues to enable the violent targeting of groups deemed threatening to Mugabe’s rule. The ongoing work of the report thus demands a continual renegotiation of what constitutes an ethical and political response to the crimes of 1983–87, the ongoing suffering of those who were targeted, and the broader culture of violent political corruption that a failure to address the past has helped to sustain. At the same time, however, Spargo underscores the difference between the language of rights and that of the persistent ethical obligation to the Other that lies at the heart of his ethical framework. Building on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Bernard Williams, Spargo emphasizes how responsibility is paradoxical in ethical and political terms: “Understanding obligations through the construct of rights foresees an end to obligation at the very point where the language of rights also ends.” The language of rights, in other words, expresses even as it curtails the scope of ethical responsibility: the limitless ethical obligation to others is translated into discrete political claims. The report captures some of this temporal heterogeneity in the ways that it attempts

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84  Disturbing the Archive to capture the longue durée of the Gukurahundi and the political import of the mourning it demands; and in doing so, the report presses against the conventions of its genre. Mourning and political community are connected in multiple ways in and through the report. The data regarding rapes, disappearances, deaths, beatings, theft, and other crimes committed by dissidents and government forces provides only a partial accounting of the scope of the region’s forcible precaritization. Nonetheless, the expert discourses that frame the data— the introduction, extensive historical context, and recommendations—­ transform it into a story, if only an incomplete story, of political failure. What should be a political contest is resolved by military and other violent action; and, even apart from the atrocities, starvation, and terror, the stakes of that political contest are largely unclear to those upon whom the contest is waged. Although Sisulu’s reference to the “wounds of silence” in her introduction opens a political space for voices of those who suffered during the campaign, it is the ensuing report that enters that space. Despite these limitations, the report also attempts to instigate a larger, national political conversation that would necessarily require a reappraisal of the responsibility of the state to its citizens. Arguing for a more expansive language for human rights reporting in general, Wilson notes that one way “to try to capture the nature of the subject matter is through engaging with the existential circumstances of the victims, bystanders, even the perpetrators. What are the choices they faced, the emotions they felt, their coping mechanisms and ensuing changes in personality?”54 This aptly describes the theoretical turn to the vulnerable subject through psychosomatic, as opposed to disembodied, legal personhood as well as the work of characterization in human rights fiction. Within the conventions of the report, as noted above, individualized stories of suffering strengthen the emotional impact of the report’s data and neutral tone. In that sense, the carefully positioned first- or second-order testimonies (usually distinguishable by a box or font change) employ the conditions of bodily and social vulnerability to produce a category of victims on whose behalf the report functions. Vulnerability in fiction, on the other hand, is scripted through character development, affect, focalization and emplotment. Although these techniques may transform the data of a report into a selection of characters and contexts, they also risk the cultivation of readerly identification that masks its own problematics. In other words, literary fiction can enhance the emotional pull of victim’s stories for a distant, humanitarian reader, or it can disrupt the equation of victimhood and vulnerability by providing a differentiated representation of a character’s sedimented and embodied existence. Such portrayals of embodied vulnerability would allow for a complex reading of context and as well as literary subjects whose value does not derive solely from violence and suffering, grief and loss. The novel as genre, in other words, invites representation of the desiring, passionate, ec-static, relational subject, and can make possible the imagination of vulnerability that exceeds

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Disturbing the Archive  85 victimhood. Critical mourning remains important to these representations. Whereas the work of a human rights report is to define a violation and its vulnerable subjects and to render them grievable victims for empowered readers, a novel does more ambiguous representational work. In the shift from victims to characters, novels invite a more complex reading of vulnerability that attends both to the theoretical critiques of Butler’s earlier formulations as well as to the ways in which mourning may signal a wider range of political subjects and varying forms of political dissent. In the remainder of this chapter, I analyze how the novels by Hove, Kilgore, and Vera engage the challenge of disturbing the archive of the Gukurahundi in order to cultivate critical mourning for the past that opens up the political future of the nation.

Fiction of the Gukurahundi The novels function more ambiguously than the human rights report in their aims and intended audiences, interpellating different readerships yet consistently transforming the data in the report into stories of, in Chenjerai Hove’s words, “what it is to be without a gun between two people who have guns.”55 Hove’s body of work as a poet and novelist addresses two central themes: Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, and land as a source of spiritual culture and its renewal. His first novel, Bones (1988), recounts the liberation era and aligns with the nationalist politics of early independence; later, more critical novels such as Shadows have resulted in more nuanced interpretations of his perspective in the context of national literature that avoids nationalist politics. Yvonne Vera’s work has received more extensive treatment outside of the frame of Zimbabwean literary studies, and frequently appears in postcolonial, southern African, world, and feminist literary studies and courses. Her oeuvre is marked by literary interventions that re-imagine key moments in the history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe from women’s perspectives that deconstruct and counter Mugabe’s masculinized, patriotic narrative of liberation.56 Even within the larger context of her work, The Stone Virgins is notable for its willingness to directly confront the violence that secured Mugabe’s rule. Finally, James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now is the most challenging to place in traditional literary categories. The novel, written during Kilgore’s nearly seven years in prison for his participation in the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s (after the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst), draws on the twenty-seven years he spent as a fugitive, much of it in Zimbabwe and South Africa. We Are All Zimbabweans Now tells the story of the gradual disenchantment of a young American doctoral student in history who arrives flush with admiration for Mugabe, the liberation hero in newly independent Zimbabwe, only to discover through interactions with both ordinary people and those connected with the government the violence at the core of Mugabe’s autocratic rule. Each novel presents a different balance between mourning the losses suffered by those targeted by the regime and building political community.

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86  Disturbing the Archive Hove’s novella adopts a lyrical and haunting tone of mourning. His subaltern characters from among the rural poor are not the source of a peasant groundswell for liberation but those whom the newly independent state has ignored, betrayed, or sacrificed. In voice and characterization, the work attempts to represent those the archive has silenced: victims and survivors of the murder campaign for whom the nation holds no affiliation nor promise and who, if they are represented at all, only appear in the data columns in the human rights reports. In contrast, Kilgore’s protagonist, Ben Dabney, models the gradual recognition of Mugabe’s abuses from the perspective of his Western leftist supporters. Kilgore tries to capture what it means to look from the outside in and learn to see from the ground up; however, the call for a historical record of dissent, disagreement, suffering, and loss remains dependent upon Dabney’s scholarship. Vera’s The Stone Virgins offers the most complex rendering of the Gukurahundi from perpetrator, victim, and bystander perspectives. Her shifting lens and multiple retellings of atrocity interrupt a singular, linear historical narrative as well as egregious forms of masculinity that try to enforce it. Whereas Hove imagines the haunting voices of those sacrificed in the name of national unity and Kilgore outlines a counter historiography that acknowledges them, Vera employs lyrical and narrative voices to produce different temporalities of critical mourning and, thus, historical, political, and individuated consciousness. Haunting and the Failure of National Politics in Chenjerai Hove’s Shadows In Shadows, the narrative has a spectral quality that conjures characters from the statistics of rural poor in the human rights report who were beaten, starved, raped, and murdered. Sibanyoni describes the narrative voice as one that is “at once a detached observer passing through a maimed consciousness of rural people, and [that] at the same time assumes the identity of any of these characters, narrating their pain.”57 This sliding perspective encourages the imagination of both individual characters as well as a larger rural consciousness that is monolithic only in its bewilderment and suffering. The final section of the novella, which concerns the Gukurahundi, begins: Then many things happened. Many other people with guns came, telling them stories of war, how they would fight to the bitter end, destroying the terrorists from the forests. – We came back from the bush, they said, because now people of our own blood rule this land. Johana’s father was confused. Many of those he thought gave wise words were also confused. They did not know what to do.58 In the first line, only “then” marks the beginning of the postliberation era and the violence of the mid-1980s. The very notion of the nation as a shared,

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Disturbing the Archive  87 modern geopolitical and historical framework fails to materialize in a narrative in which relationships are familial (Johana, Johana’s father, Johana’s father’s first wife, mother of Johana), communal, and rooted in the land one farms. Instead of strengthening the nation, the violence between government troops and dissidents serves only to destroy the relationships the book has established: families and villages are shattered by outside aggression. That “many things happened” and “[m]any other people with guns came” belies triumphal nationalist rhetoric about willing sacrifice on behalf of a clear ideology, propaganda which transforms the aggression of the state primarily against rural civilians, into a conflict between the nation’s heroes and its internal and external enemies. For Johana’s mother, charges of political alliance with one side or another make no sense: “If a man with a ­knobkerrie came to my home to ask for food, what can I do? Can a woman like me wrestle with a man with a gun, wanting to eat?”59 Her questions imply not just the extreme helplessness of the population more generally; they also suggest that the nation has utterly failed to interpellate its citizens—both would-be perpetrators and those they would harm. That failure is even more evident in the character of Johana’s father: elderly, confused, already having lost his sons to war and his daughter to suicide, he loses his life, name, and reputation in a conflict that has no political value for him. Indeed, when Johana’s father is killed by “DIZDENTS” for being a “sell-out,” “[t]hose who now ruled the land said no one knows Johana’s father. So they could not even mention his name when those who died fighting wars were mentioned. His name was not there all the time.”60 In his analysis of prohibitions against local efforts to memorialize those killed in the Gukurahundi, Werbner notes that “[t]he absence of the names is a powerful presence” that haunts the national imaginary. Hove’s novella stands in for silences in the archive: “a memorial in the making, it bears witness that the link to the nation remains troubled; it stands against the very reality it indexes, public censorship for the unnameable.”61 The narrative offers an aesthetic vehicle of mourning in place of Mugabe’s official mourning at Heroes’ Acres and in the context of a reimagination of local practices of mourning that were forbidden at the time: “No one knows Johana’s father, the people sang, many years later when these stories could be told without any danger to the storyteller.”62 The melancholic (as opposed to political) strain of mourning persists here in the paradox, “no one knows Johana’s father, the people sang.” The stories of atrocity fail to restore ­Johana’s father to the circle of social recognition that would secure his proper mourning. Burying Johana’s father “properly in the way of the ancestors” would take place only in the unlikely, conditional future-in-thepast, when “the vulture and the jackal which ate his body died so that they too could be buried.”63 The narrative generates what Sibanyoni calls “a new idiomatic language within the oral mode in order to give voice to the peasantry”64; however, there is little indication that the peasantry has any investment in the nation.

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88  Disturbing the Archive Anachrony, conditional tenses, and multiple retellings of key events contribute to the narrative’s disruptive, haunting effects. Those temporal inconsistencies clear a space for the ethical imagination of the other for whom citizenship holds no guarantees. In an incisive analysis of Benedict Anderson’s discussion of official nationalism, Marc Redfield notes that the “task of nationalism […] is to monumentalize such scenes [of loss] and fence them off. They record, and thus to some extent compensate for, the imagined community’s dependence on the unimaginable.”65 Novelistic haunting breaks down those fences—the staging of loss at Heroes’ Acres, the silence surrounding victims’ experiences of the Gukurahundi—in order to bring the unimaginable into focus, thereby deconstructing official nationalism through representation of the violence at its core. Hove’s presentation of that violence matches the confusion of those who gave testimony in Breaking the Silence. In place of political ideology and affiliation, Hove writes, “So they were insulted with many names. They did not know which ones fitted them.” In place of strategy and action, he describes their limited options: “Why should they run away? Where would they run away? They asked, puzzled. […] Their only refuge were the grass huts which sheltered them from the rain and the wind. This new rain of guns, they did not know how to shield themselves from it.”66 Hove’s natural imagery plays on the meaning of “Gukurahundi,” revealing it to be what Godwin has termed politicide, rather than a cyclical, natural occurrence; at the same time, the imagery reinforces the link so prevalent in Hove’s work between the people and the land. This link restores the totality of what has been lost for those considered to be “other” to Mugabe’s nationalization project; ironically, the land itself, once the signifier for independence, has been as decimated as the people who have tried to make their lives upon it in the face of pervasive political and economic violence. Rewriting the Archive from Above and Below in James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now The decades of abuses perpetrated by the Mugabe regime make it difficult to recall his earlier embrace by leftist supporters within and outside of the country, although there have been some recent reappraisals of his legacy. For instance, an article in The Guardian almost thirty-five years into Mugabe’s reign begins: “He has been a schoolteacher, freedom fighter and political prisoner. He has gone from admired independence leader to despised autocrat. Now a life that spans nine decades could be about to add its least expected final chapter: the rehabilitation of Robert ­Mugabe.”67 Reassessments such as this one looked toward the upcoming “credible” elections (2013), disappointment with the opposition MDC Party and its leader, Morgan ­Tsvangirai, and reassessments of the land seizures that decimated the economy by focusing on the return of white-owned farms to black ­Zimbabweans. Significantly, such reappraisals do not revisit the Gukurahundi, making the

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Disturbing the Archive  89 work of fiction and human rights reporting all the more crucial to the historical record, as well as to contemporary conversation. Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now (first published in South Africa, 2009, by Umuzi, and released in the US by Ohio University Press, 2011) takes readers back to the heady optimism of the immediate postindependence moment, when the political Left celebrated Mugabe as the hero of the liberation war as well as racial reconciliation. The novel follows ­Wisconsin graduate student Ben Dabney as he embarks on research in Zimbabwe in order to write a hagiographic history of Mugabe and the liberation war. Without fully disclosing the historical context, Kilgore begins with an imagined scene of the Fifth Brigade terrorizing a rural school in Matabeleland in an ostensible search for dissidents, but the plot quickly moves to focus on Dabney’s personal and professional education in Zimbabwe. That shift mimics the ease with which some stories may be glossed over when they do not fit within expected narrative patterns. Facts and rumors about North Korean influences, about people disappearing, and about seemingly random beatings and rapes in the countryside filter into expatriate dinner conversations; meanwhile, Dabney gradually develops Zimbabwean social and political knowledge. He initially finds news reporting of dissidents to be “[n]othing of consequence” and dismisses a local professor’s warning—“We may end up with a civil war here in Zimbabwe between the Shona of Zanu and the Ndebel of Zapu”—as an “off track” comment by someone who “is carried away with the grandeur of his investigative mission.”68 Dabney’s bildung is twofold: it concerns a re-­evaluation of the liberation struggle in the context of its aftermath; and, in his negotiations with Zimbabwean and American historians and their demands regarding his research, he learns first-hand the stakes of historiography. In many ways, Mavuso Dingani’s critical summary of the novel is accurate: Dabney embodies a “time-worn cliché: Young idealistic white westerner idealizes some natives in some distant country whom he imagines to be noble or honorable, take your pick; he decides to go and witness their experiment of building a new society firsthand, only to be disappointed when he discovers that they are only human and that their policy decisions are dictated by brutal political calculation.”69 For Dingani, Kilgore offers more than another rendition of that cliché by inventing realistic dialogue and the complex characterization of the former freedom fighter and Dabney’s girlfriend, Florence. She tutors Dabney in local (feminized) perspectives, symbolized by his gradual learning to cook sadza until it is “like a rural mother’s—light and pure white,”70 and also provides him access to different constituencies. At the same time, their relationship and the knowledge she imparts seem at once to feminize and instrumentalize what is intrinsically Zimbabwean (the rural mother’s sadza, for instance) for the benefit of Dabney’s personal and professional development. The novel tells a more complex story about the relationship of heterogeneous experiences and the historical archive when Dabney weighs his interviews with political heroes, opposition leaders, and,

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90  Disturbing the Archive finally, local people in the context of his daily life with Florence. Only then can his historical approach begin to align much more closely with his leftist politics: he recognizes the limitations of national history written through or by the lives of its leaders; and he recognizes the hypocrisy of those who espouse liberal views of social, racial, and gendered equality, yet whose daily interactions betray their prejudices. When Dabney asks Mugabe at the end of their interview to comment upon the attack at the Matabeleland school which opens the book, Mugabe responds: “Mr. Dabney, I don’t see that this has anything to do with the history you are researching. We have nothing to hide, but I wouldn’t expect to read about our dissident problem in a history book.”71 This clear articulation of the limits of official history echoes the government’s recorded silences about the Gukurahundi, but more importantly in the context of the novel, Mugabe’s statement catalyzes Dabney’s pursuit of an alternative, often feminized history, one that would include perspectives of the rural poor as in Hove’s Shadows, for instance. Like Peter Godwin’s emphasis on the anonymous hospital cleaner who gave him the tip to investigate the Matabeleland killings, Kilgore imagines history through characters such as Mrs. Taruvinga, a mother of six who during the liberation war brought soup to fighters hiding in the northern hills. Dabney’s decision to “speak to the quiet people, those behind the scenes whom historians overlook,” who “were not so important,”72 does not solidify his relationship with Florence. Whereas she remains embroiled in the struggle among those who fought the liberation war over who defines membership in the slogan, “We are all Zimbabweans now,” he seeks to expand its meaning with interviews of those who otherwise “remain hidden by history.”73 The book concludes when he returns to the US to write a history of independence based on their testimonies. The history to be written (imaginable only in the future conditional), beyond the temporal frame of the novel, would disrupt a singular narrative of the nation as the triumphant expression of the will of the masses or of capitalist expansion. An unresolved tension in the novel is Kilgore’s attempt to reconcile the desire for an alternative collective history in relation to the novel’s need for characters. This tension manifests, on the one hand, in the individuation of the protagonist’s love interest, Florence, the expat community, and several of the key figures in a subplot concerning the murder of a government official and, on the other hand, the seemingly indistinguishable features of those “quiet people” whose history Dabney aims to write. Kilgore highlights the need for a counterhistory of liberation; however, he does not fundamentally diverge from linear historiography per se. Unlike Hove’s subaltern characters who seem to lack a historical consciousness of the nation, ­Kilgore’s historical informants are always already politicized. Thus, the novel concludes with an implicit demand for a counterhistory of liberation and its aftermath, although it displaces that history to a time and a place outside of the story.74

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Anachrony, Gender, and the Future-to-Come in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins In contrast to Hove’s haunting portrayal of loss and Kilgore’s argument for a people’s history (still tied to the formation of the nation-state) to compensate for silences in the historical record, Vera’s The Stone Virgins presents the atrocities and larger context of the Gukurahundi through complex shifts in perspective and highly aestheticized language that draws attention to its own constructions, but in doing so, also risks romanticizing them. The shifting, lyrical narrative voice “not only transforms the dead past into a living past but also allows the past to call insistently to the present for the continual re-interpretation of both.”75 Driver and Samuelson, in their excellent analysis of the novel, discuss Vera’s critique of official history and the gendered dynamics that sustain it through her “rich entanglement of temporalities.”76 I extend the reading of the archive with which this chapter began to build on their argument about memory, mourning, and political engagement in the novel. The “rich entanglement of temporalities” not only generates a “living past,” but also opens up the possibilities for imagining the future-tocome in a series of small, quotidian acts as opposed to grand, teleological narratives. Moreover, Vera’s prose draws attention to its own representational strategies. Rather than serve as a substitute voice of the silenced, the novel raises larger questions about how the human rights violations might become legible through fiction. For Vera, the imagination and the aesthetic’s engagement with the past are what catch hold of moments that “flash up in a moment of danger,” as Walter Benjamin wrote,77 to disturb the historical record. Such writing also runs the risk that the Comaroffs identify of treating memory as a “sublime force from elsewhere uniquely capable of breaking the conventions of time and place.” Memory, they continue, is “‘plastic,’ interest-bearing,” and “[h]uman beings can be as readily dispossessed as redeemed by the sudden return of the past, especially when it comes back with the imprimatur of the law.”78 Thus, the combination of Vera’s focus on the individual and attention to aesthetic representation disturb the historical record but not necessarily to activate a resistant political subject. Instead, the novel defines a role for fiction in shaping the social imaginary of the past, but not what the Comaroffs term “juridical history-making, of history produced, articulated, and authorized through the courts.”79 Vera narrates individual and collective loss through telescopic writing that moves in and out of first and third person perspectives, close-ups and broad views, to tell the story of three fictional victims of the Gukurahundi: Nonceba; her sister, Thenjiwe; and a local storekeeper. Although the novel treats targets of both government and dissident violence, it focuses primarily on Thenjiwe’s murder and Nonceba’s subsequent rape and mutilation by the disaffected former liberation war soldier Sibaso and the possibilities these actions portend for the future. The attack on the storekeeper, Mahlathini, who is shot, tortured, and burned by government forces, receives far shorter treatment. At first glance, then, the novel seems to confirm the official history

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92  Disturbing the Archive that dissident violence threatened the unity of the new nation. Such a reading could imply that Mugabe’s patriarchal rule remains necessary to restore Nonceba to health after the sexualized violence by government dissidents against her and her sister. However, as Driver and Samuelson demonstrate, the complex temporality of Vera’s novel “exceed[s] an impoverished nationalist discourse with its sharp temporal distinctions, its convenient historical misrepresentations, and its insistence on the need for sacrifice in the path of progress.”80 In addition, the novel carefully reinserts the Ndebele rule during the First Chimurenga (against the British) into national history. The question of what kind of future is possible is tied to Nonceba as the central character; however, she comes to embody the atrocities committed by both sides as the female figure is instrumentalized by competing and failing nationalisms. Nonceba’s future is framed by Sibaso’s violence, on one hand, and the care offered by the archivist, Cephas, who shelters her as she heals, on the other. Yet as Eleni Coundouriotis rightly argues, “These two men, a destitute traumatized former guerilla and an urban, educated, idealistic nationalist, share a common preoccupation with the national past, and both idealize woman as an allegory of Zimbabwean nationalism.”81 Layered upon this division between violence and care is another: between Nonceba’s personal memory of crisis (her injury and the death of her sister) and the longer archival and re-creative process of national history. Thus, the novel carves a place for the anachrony and allusions of fiction over the selective linearity of nationalist history. This effort requires a careful dismantling of three masculinized narratives of national identity—Mugabe’s patriarchal rule, Sibaso’s violent dissent, and Cephas’s idealistic archival project—to rework the gendered terms of national identity. The Stone Virgins has been lauded as the first Zimbabwean novel to deal directly with Matabeleland and Midlands atrocities and for establishing fiction as a space where the bearing of the past on the present can be reconsidered. In performing this work, the narrative reinscribes the violent birth of the postcolonial nation, and Zimbabwean nationalism more generally, as one enacted through gender, rather than solely through race or ethnicity as the dominant history dictates. The text concludes not only with a critique of the patriarchal, postcolonial present, but by insisting on the national identity of Zimbabwe and the gendered relations that sustain it as a site of active production and negotiation among past, present, and future. The Stone Virgins is divided into two sections. The first begins with black township life during the 1950s and extends through Zimbabwe’s declaration of independence from Britain in 1965 under the white minority rule government of Ian Smith, the civil war between the national army and guerrilla forces of the ZANU and ZAPU parties (1966–79), and finally Mugabe’s triumph as the first elected black prime minister in 1980. The second section, 1981–86, spans the violence that followed, particularly in Matabeleland, when dissidents from the losing ZAPU party’s army, ZIPRA, as well as the government’s own Fifth Brigade—deployed in 1983 and 1984 to attack

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Disturbing the Archive  93 dissident guerrilla and civilian sympathizers with the opposition82—both attacked the civilian population. The only references in the novel to even this spare history are the chronological parameters of the sections before and after independence and occasional, cursory references to the unfolding events: “[W]ar is in their midst” or “[The women] expect some crack, some sound that will wrap over them like lightning and they will not need to ask if independence is truly here, or if this indeed is a new day” or, with respect to the Fifth Brigade: “The team of soldiers who had congregated on Thandabantu Store had demonstrated that anything that had happened so far had not been random or unplanned. Atrocious, yes, but purposeful. They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions.”83 In place of chronology, Vera allows brief historical allusions to frame individual portraits of violence, suffering, and survival. Intense scrutiny of such moments potentially disrupts inexorable historical flow, enabling a reimagining of what the past might mean for an undetermined future. The novel also shifts among different perspectives, although it only occasionally charts the central characters’ interior development. As perspective shifts from victim to perpetrator to third person narration and events are retold multiple times, the novel calls into question any unitary or objective claim to witness or record. In doing so, it opens up a multiplicity of readings that also, paradoxically, limit the potential of a collective political consciousness for the future. The heterogeneity promised by such a narrative of the nation carries with it the admission that mourning for past tragedies will never be complete because representations of them can only ever be partial, and it emphasizes that because the past has multiple meanings, the future must similarly remain open-ended. The novel shares with Breaking the Silence a commitment to representing what has been previously silenced; however, as opposed to simply correcting or humanizing the historical record through characterization, The Stone Virgins offers a meditation on what a multi-perspectival and anachronous rendering of the past might mean for the future. To borrow Butler’s phrasing in “After Loss, What Then?”: “a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full ‘recovery’ is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency.”84 The novel takes place on that horizon and it concludes poised on the threshold of what the political might entail. Vera’s lyrical writing of both interiority and external conditions does not recuperate a singular, fixed subject capable of progressing from melancholia to mourning, nor from haunting to citizenship, but activates an episodic and imagistic discourse of mourning in which, Wendy Brown argues, “history becomes less what we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by than what we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.”85 However, Nonceba’s “progress” is measured not by the law, but by the possibility of physical and social life, as well as conviviality.

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94  Disturbing the Archive In Politics Out of History, Brown invokes Benjamin’s angel of history, turned toward the wreckage of the past yet being blown into a future he cannot see, to consider the relationship between the atrocities of the past and an undetermined future. Defining the present by the “political impotence” one feels against “the trajectory and the wide range of effects of capital (as the most powerful moving force in modernity)” and the suffering that trajectory implies, she asks, “How can such a present be loved—and if it cannot be, what are our investments in addressing its ­ imbabwe, one looks back across decades of land expropriaills?”86 In Z tion during the colonial era in order to enrich the white settler class and establish apartheid rule; the independence government’s decision—despite the socialist rhetoric of the liberation struggle—to maintain the structure, private ownership priorities, and patriarchal privilege of the colonial government;87 the government’s use of force against its own people; the more recent economic collapse, in part from illegal land seizures of productive farms; and the failure of the state to address an HIV/AIDS crisis that according to the World Fact Book has reduced life expectancy by approximately twenty years, infected 25 percent of the adult population, and to which Vera s­ uccumbed in 2005. The angel cannot “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,”88 but only seeks to understand the wreckage from within the storm. In her reading of Benjamin, Brown notes that the figure may initially appear to be a passive witness: “The muteness and the impotence of the backward body […] together figure the agency of the meaning of history as approximately nothing.”89 Passivity is better understood, however, in terms of the withholding of teleology: the angel’s back is toward history because the notion of progress is unsubstantiated and the future is yet indeterminate. For Brown, it is the possibility of interrupting the steady pace of history— of creating an alternative temporality that brings muted experiences to the fore, that “allow[s] the redemptive powers of hope, dream, and utopian passion a place on the political and historical stage. Only then can history be rewritten, as a different future is coined from the present.”90 In his careful analysis of how Benjamin and Derrida approach these temporal entanglements and irruptions—the messianic for Benjamin, and what Derrida more frequently refers to as time out of joint, Owen Ware demonstrates that they share “the awareness that causality is not something fixed but created retrospectively, a construction existing only in the present and subject to change and alteration itself.”91 From there, however, Benjamin and Derrida diverge in their temporal foci. Because the present lacks inherent meaning, Benjamin looks to the past “as our responsibility to liberate history,” whereas for Derrida it “affirms the future-to-come” and, with it, “the future-to-come as the site of justice.”92 Here it is important to note that the future-to-come does not guarantee justice of any sort; rather it is tied to anachrony and heterogeneity, to rethinking historical ties and obligations to one another outside of predetermined limits.

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Disturbing the Archive  95 For some readers, Vera’s highly allusive and imagistic writing (as well as Derridean deconstructive readings) evacuates the atrocities of the past and their bearing on the future of political and corporeal materiality. What the remainder of this chapter attempts to demonstrate, however, is how reading the novel through Benjamin and Derrida’s overlapping approaches to messianic time can illuminate two key aspects of Vera’s work: first, that it is only through the decomposition of official history that an open-ended struggle for the future can take place; and, second, that gender functions as what Gayatri Spivak describes as a “general critical instrument rather than something to be factored in special cases.”93 Although Vera overtly resists writing phenomenologically about experience of rape, deprivation, and torture that women and the rural poor suffered in Matabeleland and the Midlands during the Gukurahundi, she unmasks the gendered dynamics of the political struggle that instigated those atrocities. On one level, Vera follows Benjamin’s dictum that “to articulate the past historically […] means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”94 by beginning to write each novel from an image of a single photograph, real or imagined: “I don’t even have the story at the beginning, I have only this cataclysmic moment, this shocking, painful moment, at once familiar and horrifying because of one change of detail which makes everything else tragic. For me, an entire history is contained in such a moment.”95 Vera cites two images that launched The Stone Virgins. The first is of a woman forced by the Fifth Brigade to kill her husband with an axe in order to spare their two sons. In the human rights report, a similar incident appears in one of the boxes of individual testimony that break up the compilations of data, spotlighting a specific, horrific crime: When he collapsed, they told me, his wife, to kill him with an axe. I refused, so they hit me on the head with the axe. When I regained consciousness, I was covered with blood. […] They made me kill him. They made me chop him in the neck with the axe. They chopped his head right off. […] [T]he next day I took my husband’s head, in the bag, to the hospital as they had told me to do.96 This testimony is remarkable, not only for the atrocity it recounts, but for the destruction of both the husband and wife, as the speaker becomes first the object of and then an extension of the weapon: “they hit me on the head with the axe. […] They made me chop him in the neck with the axe. […] They chopped his head right off.” The “I” appears at moments of passivity, resistance, and finally, resignation at being now beyond the sensible (“I refused,” “I was covered with blood,” “I took my husband’s head, in the bag, to the hospital”). Within the human rights report, this testimony set outside of the larger narrative functions “to support the organization’s factual and legal claims, not the other way around,”97 and this particular example speaks of depravity and savagery in ways that reinforce a view

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96  Disturbing the Archive of human rights law as the (only) bulwark against atrocity, yet one that is grossly insufficient to restoring either victim. Portraying a similar incident in the novel, Vera focuses as much on the politics of witnessing as on the crime itself. A fluctuating narrative voice moves from the third person to a first-person point of view that is loosely attached to Nonceba, who is recovering from violent rape and mutilation in a local hospital. Like the reader of Breaking the Silence, she gains access to another’s trauma, but only by overhearing it at a distance. The excerpt below appears as a fragment of an overheard conversation between two undisclosed speakers about another patient at the hospital: She has killed her husband. Two soldiers walked into her house and sat her husband on a stone. They handed her an ax. These men were pointing guns at her two grown sons, threatening to shoot them if she did not listen. She fell on her knees and begged them to let her sons go. One soldier pushed her away with the butt of his gun. She fell down and wept for her sons as though they had already died, and for the heart of the solider, which she said had died with the war. Her husband raised his voice toward her and said, ‘Kill me … Kill me.’ He pleaded. He was desperate to die and to save his sons. She stood up, silently repeating what her husband had said, with her own two lips, with her own arms. She opened her eyes and raised the ax above her shoulders till he was dead. This is what happened to her.98 Vera’s retelling retains the core of the original: that by being forced to kill her husband, the woman participated in her own destruction. She repeats to herself, “Kill me … Kill me,” as she wields the axe. However, as opposed to an exceptionally shocking example used as a pull-quote in the human rights report to dramatize horror that simultaneously distances readers from the event, Vera’s imagination invokes a community of listeners. The fictional telling repositions the hospital as a site of care and healing rather than uselessness, signifying as well that social institutions exist to address the depravity. The overheard and repeated story also provides both a clearer storyline and ethical stance for the woman and her husband: they are both clearly the victims of atrocity, however, even in the midst of their powerlessness, they retain their role as parents. Perhaps most significantly, Vera’s retelling—both its fictional context and its formal characteristics—understands the important work of testifying as something that must take place among citizens and neighbors, rather than solely between victims and human rights workers. Although overhearing a conversation about the woman forced to kill her husband may seem further removed than the direct testimony excerpted in the human rights report, Vera’s emphasis is on approximating Nonceba’s position, on what it might mean to overhear atrocity, on the obligations to others that apprehension requires. The narrative structure, in other words, asks the reader to consider what responsibility, if any, accompanies this

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Disturbing the Archive  97 retelling, this hearing. Nonceba’s response is not identification, but vivid imagination of the scene and of being, momentarily, present for it, just as Vera’s lyricism creates other staccato moments of present-ness for the reader. The second photographic image that launches the narrative is an imagined scene of dissident violence, when Sibaso beheads Thenjiwe. Vera describes this passage as a challenge to convey “in [a] way which celebrates writing.”99 Driver and Samuelson underscore the challenge of employing “language [that] shows itself capable of representing the multiple horrors of war-torn Zimbabwe in words and sentences that do not reproduce the contempt for others that lies at the basis of such horrors.”100 In the same way that Abani attempts to capture humanity “when we’re most ugly,”101 Vera pushes against the limits of ethico-aesthetic representation by writing that slows time in order to highlight moments when atrocity and the aesthetic intersect. In the novel, the beheading appears within the larger scene of Nonceba’s rape and disfigurement, when she sees Sibaso approach: His head is behind Thenjiwe, where Thenjiwe was before, floating in her body; he is in her body. He is floating like a flash of lightning. Thenjiwe’s body remains upright while this man’s head emerges behind hers, inside it, replacing each of her moments, taking her position in the azure of the sky. He is absorbing Thenjiwe’s motions into his own body, existing where Thenjiwe was, moving into the spaces she has occupied. Then Thenjiwe vanishes and he is affixed in her place, before Nonceba’s eyes, sudden and unmistakable as a storm. The moment is his. Irrevocable. His own.102 The tension of the scene exists not only in the horror of the event but in the deep silence that surrounds its slow-motion presentation; even Nonceba watching the murder “falls in the same way sound disappears.”103 Although Vera presents the beheading from Nonceba’s perspective, the text slides into third-person narration at the end of the passage (“before Nonceba’s eyes”) and thereby undermines any parallel between Nonceba and Sibaso’s authority over this moment. Rather than present this moment solely through first-person testimony, Vera depicts the lethalness of desire for complete control over the space and time of an other. Thenjiwe is less a character in the novel than a symbol of an idealized landscape, past, and politics. She encapsulates the seasons, rocks, pools, trees, and soil of the Matapos hills, what Campbell calls the “inalienability of land, seeds and water”104 that colonial rule denied through decades of legislation: the formation of Native Reserves (1894), Land Apportionment Act (1930), Native Husbandry Act (1951), Land Apportionment Act (1968), and the regulation of storing and breeding seeds in order to support commercial farmers.105 Like the spirits of the Mwali shrines housed in the caves of those hills, and often called upon in liberation struggles by both Ndebele and Shona,106 Thenjiwe is associated with the rain needed to assuage the

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98  Disturbing the Archive drought and an alternative ideation system to that promulgated by the colonial state. She acts as a bridge to Vera’s first novel, Nehanda (1993), which reimagined the First Chimurenga from the perspective of the female spirit medium who had been largely ignored historiographically (including in British historian Terence Ranger’s Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 1896–7 [1967], which focused on the importance to the rebellion of the male spirit medium, Kaguvi, as opposed to Nehanda). The difference in their perspectives initiated a lasting friendship between Vera and Ranger, who told Vera, “It’s all absolutely wrong and I love it.”107 Their friendship included an ongoing dialogue, conducted in person and through their published works, between and about ways of representing the past, a dialogue particularly important given Ranger’s foundational role in writing Zimbabwean national history.108 For Ranger, The Stone Virgins marks a break with Vera’s earlier treatment of the past: “It is not a book that establishes a deeper truth through myth and invented ritual. It is a book that confronts the reality of History and which transcends that reality by means of confrontation.”109 In this last completed novel, Vera does not so much imagine a solely feminized counterhistory as insist on history itself as open-ended and in need of constant reimagination and negotiation through both masculine and feminine nonviolent perspectives. Thenjiwe is a pivotal figure in forging a connection with Vera’s earlier reinventions of myth and ritual as well as demarcating the limits of that approach in facing the future. Although not any kind of spirit medium herself, Thenjiwe embodies the sacredness of the land which forms the foundational beliefs of ancestor worship and communal ownership, principles invoked repeatedly in the liberation struggle, and her death reads as a desecration of those foundations. At the same time, the novel resists an essentializing, melancholic focus on this loss: Thenjiwe’s story becomes a shared lens through which to read her attacker and her sister. When the archivist Cephas and Thenjiwe first meet, she offers a healing respite from the political world of colonial Rhodesia and the war: she “takes over the corner in his mind where some thought is trapped, some useless remembrance about fences with NO TRESPASS signs and NO WORK signs.”110 Their brief love affair symbolically brings together rural and urban, female and male, eastern and western parts of the country into a potentially regenerative unity. The subsequent failure of their relationship reads as a failure of communication and the impossibility of this national ideal: she “forgets his name” and everything she would like to have told him about herself, the hills, her sister, and the village of Kezi is introduced as hypothetical (“she would start, perhaps, with the marula tree”).111 Cephas represents a caring form of masculinity, but one that never acknowledges its own privilege. Not only was he removed from the violence in Matabeleland (he read in the newspaper about the attack on the sisters and then sought out Nonceba), but gender and political privilege afforded him both a security and mobility that the women lacked. Nonceba is understandably suspicious of his sudden arrival in Kezi112 as well as his request for her to move

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Disturbing the Archive  99 with him to Bulawayo; he travels freely even “when the roads are blocked and a multitude of soldiers are disturbing the peace of the land” and “wants her to leave everything, as though she does not belong here and could just leave because it makes sense to do so, makes sense to him, his view of the future and his past.”113 Even when sheltering Nonceba, he begins to desire her in place of her sister. Recognizing at last that he “had not heard [Thenjiwe] at all,” and thus that this desire cannot be fulfilled, he “retreat[s]” from Nonceba into his job as a historian for the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe: “A new nation needs to restore the past. His focus, the beehive hut, to be installed at Lobengula’s ancient kraal.”114 In his overview of Zimbabwean literary responses to violence, Kaarsholm critiques the novel and the conclusion with Lobengula cited above for its symmetrical presentations of violence (individual and communal, perpetrated by a dissident and the state), which, he argues, are resolved through “healing[,] reconciliation,” and “unity” offered by Cephas through his own travels from the Eastern Highlands to Bulawayo and his reconstruction of the past.115 Kaarsholm reads this conclusion as an evasion of political agency in favor of aesthetic concurrences. Driver and Samuelson, in contrast, read Cephas as modeling the kind of productive masculinity necessary to subtend the reconciliation process. On one level, Cephas’s delicate work in constructing a livable past, present, and future through the interweaving of their tender branches provides an alternative to the linear historiography Vera captures in the novel’s ironic opening of the urban grid labeled with the names of the colonizers: Selborne Avenue in Bulawayo cuts across Fort Street (at Charter House), across to Jameson Road (of the Jameson Raid), through to Main Street, to Grey Street, to Abercorn Street, to Fife Street, to Rhodes Street, to Borrow Street, out into the lush Centenary Gardens with their fusion of dahlias, petunias, asters, red salvia, and mauve petrea bushes, onward to the National Museum, on the left side.116 The colonial past inscribed on the city (whose name means “place of the persecuted man”) and terminating in the National Museum raises the question of the story the museum tells versus what it might take victims of that history to survive in such a place, and early chapters describe black Rhodesians living on its margins. However, as a concluding statement to both Cephas’s story and the novel, the turn to Lobengula has more ambiguous gendered, political, and individual connotations as well. Cephas’s work installing the beehive hut of Lobengula, the last Ndebele king who was defeated by the British in 1893, countermands the “logic” of ethnocide that Mugabe tries to impose; however, it still participates in the project of actively reconstructing the past in the name of national history and unity. Reconciliation of intranational violence depends upon learning that past (Ndebele as well as Shona), in order “to re-create the manner in which the tenderest branches bend,

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100  Disturbing the Archive meet, and dry, the way grass folds smoothly over this frame and weaves a nest, the way it protects the cool, livable places within.”117 Here, the past is a source of wisdom able to transcend political violence and its legacies to recover the protective order of materials shaped into shelters within the ecosystems of the natural world. At the same time, throughout the novel the reader has access to perspectives Cephas never does, and knows, therefore, that an idealized, naturalized, and feminized past, and the language of ­reconciliation and unity within which it is framed can never adequately serve as a foundation for a just future. For instance, whereas Cephas continually looks back, Nonceba remains caught in the same violent “storm” of Sibaso that claimed her sister, and her challenge is to find a way to look forward. Her perspective on the decapitation reveals its larger, gendered political ramifications. Sibaso expresses the skewed masculinity of wartime that can find no haven during ­independence.118 The promise of independence—of viable, black male subjectivity after decades of white colonial and settler rule—fails to materialize under Mugabe’s consolidation of power for all the men who participated in the liberation struggle (not to mention the female liberation fighters, who receive only brief mention in the novel). As a former member of ZIPRA, Sibaso finds himself marginalized by ZANU-PF: “Independence is the compromise to which I could not belong.”119 Having fought in the sacred caves of the Matopos hills, he is guilty of sacrilege. Although he has survived by eating spiders and making sparks with his fingertips, he discovered in the caves “that history has its ceiling” and that he has lost the ability to feel.120 Returning home to his father’s house in the Njube Township, he finds a new tenant, and only a novel and map from his university days exist as remnants of his former life there. Both texts signify his earlier, idealistic commitment to the liberation struggle and his recognition of the failures of independence. With no connection to his family (his father has disappeared and probably died in prison, and his mother died while giving birth to him), no home, and no reward for the sacrifices made as a guerrilla fighter, he claims, “geographies are my only matter”; yet relegated to the hills, without a declared enemy, “he invents another.”121 His attack on the sisters therefore stems from the political failure of the nation to include him rather than their status as political enemies. His violent, “finely practiced” motions usurp Thenjiwe’s space, mind, and body, seeking only to claim their territories for himself.122 Sibaso provides the strongest evidence in the novel for Vera’s claim that the “sort of weightlessness [of not being gendered] should be experienced at least once by each human being, and all the time by all nations.”123 The metaphor of spiders that runs throughout the novel counters an essentialized and idealized reading of nature that Thenjiwe and Cephas’s final return to the land might suggest. Whereas in Nehanda, spiders symbolized the anticolonial struggle,124 in The Stone Virgins and Vera’s short story, “In Africa There Is a Kind of Spider,” spiders are associated with the

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Disturbing the Archive  101 corruption of the postcolonial future by masculinized discourses of power. In the short story, set in 1999, Sibaso, who can find no place in the new Zimbabwe after his participation in the struggle for liberation and as a dissident in the Gukurahundi, tells his niece: “Every spider is a politician, every politician envies a spider. Dancing with a wasp.”125 Together the novel and the story trace Sibaso’s transformation, from living with spiders in the bush during wartime to gradually subsisting as one, waiting for his prey. In a description that evokes Thenjiwe’s murder, Vera writes in the short story, “A spider never wastes its venom. You could feel its belly graze your skin. Poised. It made an art of inflicting harm and approaching you in daylight. It had a swiftness about it that seemed not to belong to the species.”126 Although the story extends the narrative of Sibaso beyond the temporal frame of the novel, which ends with him as a social outcast in 1986, only in the novel does Vera grant access to his interior consciousness. This willingness to explore the damaged psyche and to imagine from his perspective extends the work of mourning in the novel. Without diminishing or rationalizing his atrocities, Vera links them to psychological and political damages that must be addressed. The narrative trajectories of Cephas and Sibaso offer two failed models of national belonging. Whether they are enacted through reconstruction or destruction, both are motivated by gendered ideations of the nation and both storylines draw attention away from the widespread regional violence suffered during the Gukurahundi. That story, which provides more context than plot, is represented by the murder of Mahlathini and the burning of his store, which represents the larger destruction of the community: “[T]here is nothing else left communal since the day the Thandabantu Store blazed down.”127 Earlier the store functioned as a village center (the site where Cephas and Thenjiwe first met), a link to the wider world, and a locus of victory celebrations. Vera describes the female freedom fighters, “the ultimate embodiment of freedom,” as they lounged at the store, in terms that recall Thenjiwe: “Freedom: a way of being, a voice, a body to behold. From this veranda, independence could be watched like a sun in the distance; an arm held up could capture a few of its rays.”128 That vision of female empowerment and independence, coded in natural imagery, threatens the local men, who “stare and let themselves be enamored by the possibilities of freedom,” yet are “unable to imagine anything at all they hold in common [with the women], not even independence or the soccer score, nothing to discuss […]. With disbelief at their own inability, they submit to a lengthening silence.”129 Sibaso, described as similarly unable to “capture a few of [the] rays,” instead “tak[es] [Thenjiwe’s] position in the azure of the sky.”130 If the recurring metaphors relegate the contributions of female freedom fighters a personal challenge to Sibaso, the women have a more political function in the story of Mahlathini. The soldiers who attack the store accuse him “of offering a meeting place where anything could be spoken, planned, and allowed to happen.”131 The government attack on the

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102  Disturbing the Archive site where the women freedom fighters congregated rewrites the accusation of dissident activity into gendered trespasses against patriarchal rule. Vera’s imagery critiques the gendering of national power that violently insists on its own masculine privilege. The price of that privilege is not just the victimization of the sisters, but the loss of community—Kezi has become “a naked cemetery”—and the silencing of that loss: like that of Johana’s father in Hove’s Shadows, Mahlathini’s murder “would not be registered,” and on the charred grounds where his store stood, the center of village life, “there is nothing else left com­ rigade munal.”132 Although Vera does not provide interiority to the Fifth B soldiers as she does for Sibaso, she does retell the attack on Mahlathini from multiple perspectives, including his. On the one hand, the novel draws attention to rather than substitutes for the incomplete historical record: “Some of the men who are missing in the village are said to have certainly died there; the others, it is said, walked all the way from Kezi to Bulawayo,” versus, “Others insist that nobody fled to Bulawayo on that night but that some men were forcibly taken kilometers from Kezi, dragged way past the hills of Gulati, deep into campsites where many others were being held, tortured, killed, and buried in mass graves.”133 As with Nonceba’s violation, however, the time of the attack is frozen for its victim. Mahlathini “could no longer hear the voices, the gunshots, the chaotic movements inside his store. Everything he knew to be happening seemed to take too long.”134 This heterotemporal telling reveals the gaps in the historical record as well as the ethical imperative of disjointed time: the impossibility of translating Mahlathini’s experience into the larger, singular historical narrative without further violence. These divisions in temporal and sensory experience also occur in the narration of Nonceba’s torture. The silence that surrounds Thenjiwe’s beheading envelops Nonceba when Sibaso, after raping her, cuts off her lips. Much of her physical recovery intertwines with her emotional need to discover how to speak again in addition to raising the larger problem of the representation of atrocity as integral to historical consciousness. The tension between the desire for and suspicion of narrative authority sustains the novel and disrupts the neat symmetry Kaarsholm rightly distrusts. Signifying this tension, Nonceba’s attack receives five tellings: the narrator’s initial description from Nonceba’s point of view, her partial memory of the attack interspersed with S­ ibaso’s narration, the newspaper report, the hospital card that summarizes her injuries, and her retelling of the first version in the first person. Each offers a partial representation available to particular audiences, and none fully reconstructs the attack. These retellings also provide different rationales for the violence. For instance, the novel provides evidence to suggest that the sisters’ independence outside of patriarchal norms (their father has died, Thenjiwe is in her thirties and unmarried, and Nonceba has just returned from boarding school) renders them at once vulnerable and perhaps threatening in their ability to exist in a world Sibaso cannot. At the same time,

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Disturbing the Archive  103 Sibaso’s violent and skewed masculinity is itself depicted as a product of a failed, inclusive nationalism. In either case, the novel ties the remaking of the world, as Elaine Scarry might put it, with the need to witness atrocity: “only then will [Nonceba] discover a world in contrast to her predicament.”135 Despite the exigency of witnessing, the novel remains circumspect on the ways in which narrative authority may be misappropriated and misused. Cephas only gains access to the two public records of Nonceba’s trauma through the hospital card and newspaper report; as with Thenjiwe, he is not patient enough to wait for Nonceba to tell her own story. The reader, on the other hand, may find in the space between the third- and first-person narrations a glimpse of the future political agency that the text only hints might be possible but stops short of imagining. Scarry writes that “political power […] entails the power of self-description,”136 and Nonceba, without the metaphoric flourishes that mark much of the text, at once describes and resists describing the minute details of her mutilation. However precisely she remembers the cutting, she describes the action itself, as did Mahlathini, in terms of the loss of sensory perception, a loss the imagination must fill without resorting to the terms of phenomenological identification: I close my eyes briefly. Perhaps I do not close my eyes at all, but I miss his next act. It occurs between one breath and the next, one gesture, one act. I carry this moment now like a blindness. […] His scent vanishes […]. I miss his arm swinging toward me, and him, holding the shape, the curve of my body on his palm, on the edge of his sudden and fine instrument. I recall no sound. I hear nothing […]. I do not feel his first stroke.137 The denial of seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling the torture and torturer does not invalidate the subjective “I,” which remains steady throughout the passage, though it does insist on the impossibility of complete representation. As opposed to associating narrative authority with complete knowledge, Vera offers a lyric voice that promises only fractured representations and that admits some experience cannot be represented conventionally. The more linear beginning and end of the novel cannot contain the stories and silences within, and individual memory cannot offer a counter-record: Thenjiwe and the rural community are gone, Nonceba’s memory is incomplete, and accounts of Mahlathini’s death are conflicting—although the need for critical mourning continues. The moments of the attacks provide an example of memory’s irruption of history in Benjamin’s terms as well as its imminent critique, and the book circles around them. For Nonceba, “Nothing is said. Not about Thenjiwe. Not about the war. Nothing said can return Thenjiwe to us. Nothing said today or tomorrow. Nothing.”138 This moment at which time stops crystallizes Vera’s desire to “revisit the horror of this […] to ask how it was

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104  Disturbing the Archive possible.”139 Although Mahlathini’s death dissolves and silences a community in the logic of the novel, time begins to flow again for Nonceba once she finds a voice with which to witness what she experienced as well as to come to terms with that violence, and the losses it occasioned, as inescapable companions for the future. Her story ends optimistically in that she has found a way to make life livable again, but it is also (productively, I argue) ambiguous: “A new path has opened for her; she will meet other people at work, build new friendships, have colleagues, discover qualities of her own.”140 Whereas Cephas, like Benjamin’s angel of history, turns toward the past, Nonceba faces the future. As discussed above, Cephas’s attempt to reclaim the past by resurrecting Lobengula’s kraal couples historical consciousness and the desire for redemption (for not understanding and then leaving Thenjiwe) in the terms of mourning Brown locates in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History; however, his attempt also demonstrates the insufficiencies of that project. Brown argues that “Benjamin’s location of historical consciousness ‘within the cultural work of mourning’ allows for the possibility of redeeming historical losses, a redemption that conventionally melancholic attachments to those losses would foreclose. Achieving this redemption through what Benjamin terms an ‘activation’ of the past opens new possibilities in the present as well.”141 This logic depends on the separation of mourning (grief that takes a particular object) from melancholia (unspecified grief), and Brown clearly indicates the focus on past and present in Benjamin’s approach. Cephas’s present is made meaningful by his yearning to learn from the past, in hopes that sheltering techniques used in Lobengula’s hut offer some protection for the present as well. His desire to recreate a sheltering nest by learning to weave together the tenderest branches invokes the earlier associations of Thenjiwe with Zimbabwe’s natural world of land and seeds. Although the novel ends with the idealized, naturalized, and feminized image of those branches woven together, Vera’s consistent critique of such idealizations and the singular histories they produce also suggests that readers should be wary of this romanticized conclusion. In contrast, Nonceba represents an open-ended future that, while seemingly positive, is neither as explicitly national as Cephas’s is nor redemptive in either its religious or secular senses. She is saved from neither evil nor the debt of social obligation, and the essentialized rooting of identity in the land has given way to an urban future. In the course of the novel, she is propelled forward from vulnerability as injurability to the vulnerability of relationality with all of the messiness that implies. Significantly, relationality also takes the place of the “feminist and ‘free’” subject of human rights that one might anticipate and that would tie Nonceba once more to a particular narrative of the modern subject.142 Instead, the inconclusive ending to her storyline, particularly as compared with Cephas’s, exemplifies the shift from Benjamin’s concept of the angel of history to Derrida’s concepts of messianic or disjointed time. Ware demonstrates that for Derrida, “disjointed

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Disturbing the Archive  105 time does not necessarily lead to justice; it simply opens up the heterogeneity crucial for any respect and responsibility toward the other.”143 If readers are asked to chart the options offered by the two surviving main characters of the novel, Cephas represents a renewed calling to the singular narrative of national development—symbolized by the movement from the enclosures of Lobengula’s beehive hut to the National Museum. In contrast, Nonceba calls forth an experience of atrocity that includes disfigurement as well as the loss of family and home; however, her future remains open and undetermined through her movement first into the city and then out of the apartment she shares with Cephas and into the larger social—though not necessarily p ­ oliticized or national—networks.

Conclusion: Against Reconciliation In their critical overview of Zimbabwean nationalist historiography, Brian Raftopoulos and A. S. Mlambo write: The outcome of [the Gukurahundi] was the 1987 Unity Accord, which while it ended the atrocities in Matabeleland, effectively emasculated the major opposition party at the time […] and confirmed the regional subordination of the Matabeleland. Thus, while the ruling party used the language of reconciliation to structure its relations with the white elite and international capital, it deployed the discourse of a violently imposed “unity” to control the political opposition.144 Moreover, reconciliation was followed by an amnesty agreement the following year that ostensibly welcomed dissidents back into the national fold; however, as Shari Eppel details: “It was clearly an estimated 3,500 members of the 5 Brigade who benefited most: they were pardoned for the murders of 10,000 civilians, the rape and torture of tens of thousands more, and property destruction often resulting in total loss for victims.”145 Complementing Raftopoulos and Mlambe’s critical history, this chapter has examined how the human rights report and fiction have also participated in unmasking the rhetoric of reconciliation and unity in order to illuminate the violent underbelly of Mugabe’s power and its political and social legacies. I have employed the concept of the archive as a fulcrum between the historical and human rights oriented approaches to the Gukurahundi. Although historiography typically results from mining the archive, the official Zimbabwean archive consists of actively censored and skewed representations of the intranational violence, starvation, and terror that took place during the country’s first decade. If, as Derrida argues, an archive reflects the political will and ideology of its producers, yet always threatens to implode or to fracture into unrecognizable components by the shadowy presence of what it seeks to exclude, then altering the form and process of archivization should make possible the writing of alternative histories and, thus, the imagination of new futures.

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106  Disturbing the Archive According to the Mugabe government, the Gukurahundi operations were necessary to protect the security of a fragile new nation, under threat from South African-sponsored and dissident efforts to destabilize the government. The security of the nation—founded on a story of national liberation as the inevitable result of popular will and earlier liberation struggles—provided a rationale for the aggressive use of state power to protect the feminized ideal of the nation from those who would destroy it. In place of precarious communities who were targeted by the state, the official rhetoric declaimed the necessary and ostensibly willing sacrifices of a national community to maintain its unity and strength. The initial human rights report, Breaking the Silence, countered that official narrative in two ways. First, in keeping with the goals of the genre to define a crisis and the precarious community it affects, the report adds to the archive of nation-building an accounting of the kinds of violations committed and their times and locations, as well as a discussion of the report’s own methodologies. Thus, Breaking the Silence provided the necessary metadata to define rural and largely poor communities in regions populated primarily by Ndebele people who were victim to the predatory attacks of the state perpetrated by foreign-trained troops and “soft” policies such as forced starvation. Although the summary report reiterated the importance of national unity, it argued that unity depended upon the recognition, by Zimbabweans who were unaffected by or beneficiaries of Mugabe’s policies, of the atrocities that contributed to both his consolidation of power and the culture of impunity that was the Gukurahundi’s direct legacy. Moreover, by offering a large and complex historical context for the violence, the report implicitly challenged a simpler story of a unified national identity finally realized through successive chimurengas. More than any other individual text under consideration in this chapter, the report defined a precarious community (of individuals, families, and villages) in terms of the suffering it experienced and the social, economic, and political human rights claims to which it was entitled, including: legal damages, recovery of bodies, official acknowledgment, reparations, health services, and constitutional safeguards. At the time, the human rights teams compiling and writing the report carefully refrained from making claims on behalf of that community. Refusing to make those claims directly, and offering recommendations in their place, facilitates the distinction between the authority (and potentially the legal standing) of the report and those people it represents. The republication of the report as Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, forty years after the end of campaign, serves a very different purpose. As discussed above, the new paratextual frames of the original material clearly reposition the data and analysis to be most relevant in understanding Mugabe’s legacy. With this focus, the report functions more powerfully to disturb the official archive for historians inside and outside of Zimbabwe than to ground human rights claims by those who experienced the events documented. Character development, plot, focalization, and voice in fiction can work paradoxically in relation to human rights reporting, and the three novels

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Disturbing the Archive  107 under consideration in this chapter reflect those paradoxes. Although these features of fiction can make an event more memorable, more complicated, or more powerful emotionally, they can also erase the scale of atrocity (by substituting a handful of characters for the thousands who suffered), aestheticize its violence, and substitute the work of the imagination for that of the material and political labor necessary to respond ethically or juridically to the experiences at fiction’s core. Each of the three novels discussed takes a distinct approach to the Gukurahundi, although they all share a desire to peel back the official euphemisms to imagine heterogeneous stories of those who suffered. Hove’s Shadows tries to give voice to the precarious community defined in the human rights report, although he simultaneously depoliticizes and homogenizes that community. The desire for mourning at once counters the official narrative of willing sacrifice and substitutes mourning for more contestatory political claims that survivors might make against the regime. Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now focuses more on the process of archivization and historiography. The novel ultimately argues for the need to gather stories of precaritization in order to properly understand the present, although in the logic of the novel those stories still require the mediation of a subaltern collective by an outside historian. The third and last novel, Vera’s The Stone Virgins, attempts to tell a story of the ­Gukurahundi while avoiding the language of ethnic specificity, the phenomenological sharing of suffering, or normative human rights. In the context of the novel, gendered idealizations can produce either the capacity for egregious violence or for romanticized desire, outcomes that are not equivalent except in their insufficiency as foundations for a just or livable future. By critiquing these familiar strategies of representation though perspectival shifts and the gaps between them, Vera underscores the difficult but necessary work of giving up an ideal past in order to participate in the uneven work of forging socio-political communities for the future. At the same time, the novel illuminates those areas where the work of human rights and fiction diverge in conjuring categories of legal personhood versus characters who are not wholly scripted by the law.

Notes 1. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, xvi. 2. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 82. 3. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 4. 4. Azoulay, “Ending World War II—Visual Literacy Class in Human Rights,” 159. 5. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 17. 6. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 50n14. 7. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 99. 8. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 112. 9. Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 19. 10. Fuster, “More Than Vulnerable: Rethinking Community,” 137.

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108  Disturbing the Archive 11. Lloyd, “Towards a Cultural Politics of Vulnerability: Precarious Lives and Ungrievable Deaths,” 93–98. 12. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 114, 110. 13. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, 151. 14. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation. 15. Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony, 153–59, 159. 16. For analysis of how historiographic debates continue to shape current politics in Zimbabwe, see Ranger’s “Rule by Historiography: The Struggle over the Past in Contemporary Zimbabwe” and Ndlovu-Gastheni, “Mapping Cultural and Colonial Encounters, 1880s–1930s.” 17. Sibanyoni, “‘The Fading Songs of Chimurenga’: Chenjerai Hove and the Subversion of Nationalist Politics in Zimbabwean Literature,” 60. 18. Davis and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins,” 177. 19. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 284–87. Twenty thousand deaths is the most commonly cited figure. 20. Ncube, “Foreword to the 2007 Edition,” Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, xi. 21. For outstanding analyses of the politics of memorialization and national identity at Heroes’ Acres, see Kriger’s “The Politics of Creating National Heroes: The Search for Political Legitimacy and National Identity” as well as Werbner’s “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe.” 22. Quoted in Alexander et al., Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, 258. The ZIPRA/ZAPU and ZANLA/ZAPU divisions corresponded to a limited extent to ethnic divisions between the Ndebele and Shona peoples, respectively, though both parties and armed forces were multi-ethnic, had nationalist platforms, and were at various times and in various incarnations united. See, for example, Alexander, et al.’s chapter on “The Rise of Nationalist Violence” in Violence and Memory and Bhebe and Ranger, eds., Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War. 23. Renan, “What is a nation?” 11. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 199–200. 24. Quoted in Alexander et al., Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, 258. 25. Derrida, “Archive Fever,” 57. 26. Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe,” 98, 97. 27. See Peter Godwin, “Mugabe stifles resistance with rape and murder,” From the Archive, 15 April 1984; “Peter Godwin finds evidence of brutality as troops lay siege to Matabeleland,” The Sunday Times (London), 6 December 2009: Features, 29; “Stench of death everywhere in Mugabe’s siege of Matabeleland,” The Sunday Times (London), 15 April 1984: 13; and “Zimbabwe massacre bodies found in mine.” The Sunday Times (London), 15 April 1984: 1. 28. Godwin, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, 340–41. 29. Godwin, Mukiwa, 385. 30. Glenn Frankel, “Zimbabwe criticizes foreign media,” The Washington Post, 18 April 1984: A24.

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Disturbing the Archive  109 31. Reported in R. W. Apple, Jr., “London duel: business vs. journalism,” The New York Times, 18 April 1984: A3. See also Donald Trelford, “Unruffled surface hides Matabeleland violence,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), 17 April 1984. 32. Donald Trelford, “Journalist who first exposed Matabeleland atrocities,” Newzimbabwe.com, 3 December 2000. Republished http://zimfinalpush2.blogspot. com/2007/06/journalist-who-first-exposed.html. 33. CCJPZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 13. 34. Hope, “Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishess,” 52. 35. Mutua, Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, 11. 36. CCJPZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 378. 37. Chan, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands in 1980–1986, Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, cover. 38. Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and Legal Resources Foundation, Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A report into the disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands 1980–1988. A Summary (April 1999). 39. Slaughter, “Narration and International Human Rights Law,” para. 8. 40. CCJP, “A Summary,” Breaking the Silence. 41. Sisulu, “Introduction to the 2007 Edition,” Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, xv. 42. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations: Social Contexts and Subjectivities,” 151. 43. Dudai, “‘Can You Describe This?’ Human Rights Reports and What They Tell Us About the Human Rights Movement,” 249, 250. 44. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 196. 45. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations: Social Contexts and Subjectivities,” 139. 46. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations,” 134. 47. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 288. 48. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 11. 49. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations,” 142. 50. Sisulu, “Introduction to the 2007 Edition,” Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, xiv. 51. CCJPZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 7, 4. 52. Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature, 11. 53. Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning, 4. 54. Wilson, “Representing Human Rights Violations,” 156. 55. Veit-Wild, Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe, 35–36. 56. Each of Vera’s six previous novels, in addition to her final uncompleted work, focus on a key moment (the First Chimurenga, 1950s black township life, the Second Chimurenga, the violence of the 1980s, and, reportedly, Mugabe’s Third Chimurenga), reimagined and retold from the margins and illuminating women’s lives. 57. Sibanyoni, “‘The Fading Songs of Chimurenga’: Chenjerai Hove and the Subversion of Nationalist Politics in Zimbabwean Literature,” 71. 58. Hove, Shadows, 91. 59. Hove, Shadows, 96. 60. Hove, Shadows, 108, 110. 61. Werbner, “Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun,” 98.

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110  Disturbing the Archive 62. Hove, Shadows, 109–10. 63. Hove, Shadows, 110. 64. Sibanyoni, “‘The Fading Songs of Chimurenga,’” 64. 65. Redfield, “Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning,” 81. 66. Hove, Shadows, 91. 67. David Smith, “Robert Mugabe: from liberation hero to villain to redeemed father of a nation?” The Guardian (UK), 10 May 2013. 68. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 9, 34–35. 69. Dingani, “Power and Pitfalls of Historical Fiction.” 70. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 242. 71. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 248. 72. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 252. 73. Kilgore, We Are All Zimbabweans Now, 257. 74. One book that responds to the novel’s call is Orner and Holmes, eds., Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. 75. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins,” 200. 76. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 181. 77. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 78. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 152. 79. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 141. 80. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 176. 81. Coundouriotis, The People’s Right to the Novel, 208. 82. Alao, in “The Metamorphosis of the ‘Unorthodox’: The Integration and Early Development of the Zimbabwean National Army,” provides a useful overview of how the formation of the Fifth Brigade out of former ZANLA guerrillas, as part of the country’s new Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) has had lasting influence on the failures of the ZNA as an apolitical force. 83. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 9, 51, 135. 84. Butler, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” 467. 85. Brown, Politics out of History, 155. 86. Brown, Politics out of History, 139, 142. 87. Horace Campbell writes, “All the major ministries [in Rhodesia], the prime minister’s office, finance, internal security, foreign affairs, combined operations, planning, transport, commerce, and education were organized for the defence of white privilege […]. The victorious guerrillas were either going to dismantle the massive organization of coercion or integrate the freedom fighters into the coercive institutions of the state. The government chose the latter path and ZANU became a party of militarists not very different from the Rhodesian Front in its military organization” (16). 88. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 257. 89. Brown, Politics out of History, 159. 90. Brown, Politics out of History, 160. 91. Ware, “Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future: Derrida and Benjamin on the Concept of Messianism,” 102. 92. Ware, “Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future,” 105, 107. 93. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 74. 94. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 255.

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Disturbing the Archive  111 95. Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera, 1 August 2000, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe: ‘Survival is in the Mouth,’” 219. 96. CCPJZ, Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, 64. 97. Dudai, “‘Can You Describe This?’” 255. 98. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 89. 99. Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera,” 224. 100. Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 200. 101. Abani, “Chris Abani Muses on Humanity.” 102. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 73. 103. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 74. 104. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 85. 105. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, 105. 106. Ranger’s Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matapos Hills of Zimbabwe (1999) details Joseph Nkomo’s visit to the sacred caves of the Mwali cult in 1953, the role the caves and spirit mediums played during the liberation war for both ZANLA and ZIPRA forces, and contemporary struggles over their political significance as well as land use rights. 107. Ranger, “History Has Its Ceiling: The Pressures of the Past in The Stone Virgins,” 203. 108. Ranger has also said he is working on social history entitled Bulawayo Burning to “respon[d] to the challenge of Vera’s Butterfly Burning […]. I do plan to write a ‘real’ history, but one which reads like a novel” (“History,” 204). For a critique of Ranger’s early historiography, see Ndlovu-Gastheni. 109. Ranger, “History Has Its Ceiling: The Pressures of the Past in The Stone Virgins,” 206. 110. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 32. 111. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 45, 46. 112. See Driver and Samuelson for an excellent reading of how Vera’s introduction of Cephas emphasizes his “dangerous proximity” to Sibaso and the sisters (Driver and Samuelson, “History’s Intimate Invasions,” 188). 113. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 149, 161. 114. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 184. 115. Kaarsholm, “Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe,” 15. 116. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 3. 117. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 184. 118. In his critique of Mugabe’s rule, Campbell links the status of women in Zimbabwean society to a “crisis of masculinity” resulting from the liberation war. He refers to the “Zulu/Ndebele word doda […] to capture the necessity for African males in southern Africa to demonstrate their virility and masculinity in the face of the hegemonic masculinity of the settlers and those with economic power,” adding that “the socialisation of males as brave warriors became deformed throughout the region and this deformity was especially acute in the aftermath of liberation struggles where the victorious African males could not demonstrate concretely the fruits of their victories” (Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation, 131). 119. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 97. 120. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 83.

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112  Disturbing the Archive 121. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 106. 122. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 75. 123. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 122. 124. For a discussion of this symbolism, see Bull-Christiansen, Tales of the Nation: Feminist Nationalism or Patriotic History? Defining National History and Identity in Zimbabwe, 97. 125. Vera, “In Africa There Is a Kind of Spider,” 922. 126. Vera, “In Africa There Is a Kind of Spider,” 924. 127. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 130. 128. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 130. 129. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 62. 130. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 73. 131. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 132. 132. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 159, 133, 128. 133. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 134, 135. 134. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 133. 135. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 91. 136. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 279. 137. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 110–11. 138. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 117. 139. Bryce, “Interview with Yvonne Vera,” 225. 140. Vera, The Stone Virgins, 174. 141. Brown, Politics out of History, 144. 142. Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, 138. 143. Ware, “Dialectic of the Past/Disjuncture of the Future,” 107. 144. Raftopoulos and Mlambo, “Introduction: The Hard Road to Becoming National,” xix. 145. Eppel, “‘Gukurahundi’: The Need for Truth and Reparation,” 46.

3 Overexposed

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Compounded Vulnerability and Continuing Liability in Fiction of Bhopal

Indeed, there may be different opinions of laws or on questions of policy or even on what may be considered wise or unwise; but when one speaks of justice and truth, these words mean the same thing to all men whose judgment is uncommitted. Union Carbide Corporation v Union of India and Ors [1989] 1 SCR 730 I said, many books have been written about this place, not one has changed anything for the better, how will yours be different? You will bleat like all the rest. You’ll talk of rights, law, justice. Those words sound the same in my mouth as in yours but they don’t mean the same. Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

When water inadvertently entered a tank storing forty-seven tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), the active ingredient in the pesticide Sevin, during routine pipe maintenance at a Union Carbide factory just after midnight on December 3, 1984, the reaction produced toxic gas clouds which, in the prevailing southerly winds, drifted directly over the semi-legal shanty-towns abutting the factory and housing the poorest residents and toward the railway station in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. Sluggish sales and the US parent company’s decision to close the plant soon meant that Sevin was not in production, and key safety features, including the cooling system and the tower flares (designed to burn off any escaping gas), had been turned off. Although an exact accounting of immediate and long-term casualties has long been disputed, thousands died of respiratory paralysis, pulmonary hemorrhages and edema, and cardiac arrest, and tens of thousands were severely injured that night, while hundreds of thousands suffer(ed) short- and long-term effects from gas exposure. Now decades after the initial explosion and its widespread media coverage, inadequate legal, political, economic, and medical actions and the ongoing toxicity of the environment continue to catalyze intergenerational campaigns for justice. This chapter investigates “Bhopal” as a particularly egregious example of how those who are structurally disadvantaged are vulnerable to overexposure by both toxic chemicals and media representations. More specifically, I examine the ways in which human rights discourses that travel the circuits of neoliberal dominance may succeed in defining victims of the disaster

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114 Overexposed without significantly advancing their claims. My reading of the human rights context of Union Carbide explosion and its continuing aftermath reveals a contested social imaginary, fought over by what Sheila Jasanoff terms various “civic epistemologies”1—those professionalized discourses from epidemiology, law, and governmentality that define their objects of concern, unavoidably through the exclusion of their alternatives. In Bhopal, the effects of these bureaucratizing epistemologies have been particularly damaging to gas-affected Bhopalis who already forged a precarious existence in the shadow of the plant, without the basic literacy and medical records, among other factors, that would secure positive forms of legal personhood. I turn to three fictions of Bhopal—Meaghan Delahunt’s The Red Book (2008), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (1995 in English)—for the ways in which fiction engages the social imaginary, rendering its operations more transparent, if not always altering its outcomes. The goals of, discourses around, and participation in legal proceedings and advocacy campaigns are determined by how vulnerability to toxic exposure is defined and who actively claims as well as who is claimed by exposure. Complicating efforts at solidarity across campaigns are both the competing interests of various stakeholders, as well as the compounded vulnerability of those directly affected by the gas. For instance, international activists mobilizing under the slogan “We All Live in Bhopal” press for broad corporate adherence to principles such as those defined in the UN Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights (2003), particularly in order to make compliance with such principles mandatory rather than voluntary, whereas local activists advocate for water-quality monitoring, medical care, financial settlements, vocational training, and their own free expression, among other aims. Depending on their interrelated embodied and structural vulnerabilities, gas-affected Bhopalis are variously situated in relation to these campaigns. Whereas factors such as wind direction at the time of the explosion or the unanswered question of the best antidote to its chemical poisoning inject Bhopal (as an event) with an aura of random suffering and unfathomable catastrophe, the activist campaigns draw competing circles of causality and responsibility around the disaster, thereby producing multiple claims for continuing liability that may or may not map onto the material existence of the gas-affected. What a reading of these shifting discourses and contexts disclose, are the ways in which Bhopalis’ toxic exposure emerges as an effect of precaritization through neoliberalism, which includes “not only destabilization through wage labor, but also a destabilization of ways of living and hence, bodies.”2 In abstract terms, those compounded effects of neoliberalism include intercontextual forms of vulnerability and precarity tied to gender, literacy, religion, political affiliation, economic mobility, and nationhood—the ways in which specific subject positions, located at the intersection of multiple oppressions, differentially experience physical

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Overexposed  115 harm in conjunction with economic and political disenfranchisement. Compounded and imposed vulnerability were and are determining factors in levels of exposure to the heterogeneous temporal and geographic scales of the disaster—from the point of the water leak to the path of the poisonous gas cloud; from sufferers’ internal injuries to the still-standing, derelict plant; from the history of Union Carbide in India beginning in 1934 to contemporary campaigns for corporate liability of the now parent company, Dow Chemical. Traversing what is visible and invisible, corporeal and international, and traceable to both a moment and a history, these scales would seem to call for a robust human rights imaginary, one that is relevant to various registers of injury, suffering, and liability; however, Bhopalis have been denied justice precisely at the junction between rights and legal personhood. Indeed Bhopalis’ toxic exposure has been compounded and in many cases overexposed by mediatized, corporate, and legal representations that generate abjection or the negative personhood of expendability. These representations also often displace from the social imaginary alternative narratives propelled by the embodied, lived experience of precarity in its various forms. In order to investigate a fuller range of subjects and their claims than those represented in dominant discourses, this chapter analyzes fiction in relation to the norms produced through legal cases and reportage of the 1984 Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, which is often cited as the most toxic industrial disaster in history. I examine fiction’s contributions to the social imaginary of the event in order to unpack claims for continuing liability by and on behalf of those whose toxic exposure was and is rooted in imposed, lasting, and compounded vulnerability. Whereas fiction does not function analogously to an epidemiological report or a legal judgment, I argue that fiction may make the operations of these different approaches available to scrutiny in particularly compelling ways. As opposed to a newspaper report’s immediacy or the linear temporality of the law, fiction provides an imaginative ground for the consideration of the competing, heterotemporal and heterospatial scales of the catastrophe. Those scales frame different civic epistemologies and the claims that arise from them, and thereby challenge dominant imaginaries of social justice as well as the limitations of some of the legal and medical models deployed in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. Legal, journalistic, and humanitarian discourses on Bhopal each generate their own subjects of biopolitical and geopolitical governmentality, and I turn to the literary fiction to explore the ways it works contradictorily to reinforce prevailing narratives of victimhood while also animating new forms of political subjectivization. The danger and the potential of vulnerability theory emerge clearly in this context. Anna Grear argues that re-centering the vulnerable subject in human rights law can expose the fallacy or impossibility of the abstract, liberal subject and, in doing so, counter the corporatization of human rights through the corporate body’s claim to personhood as well as the

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116 Overexposed development of “trade-related, market-friendly human rights.”3 Grear’s analysis begins with the distinction between legal subjectivity, on one hand, and legal personhood and personalities, on the other. Whereas legal subjectivity refers to “a unit (whether a plant, an animal, a human being, a spirit, or a group) regarded as important enough to merit juridical protection and thus the subject of legal rights,” legal personhood has multiple meanings.4 These include personhood as a synonym for legal subjectivity as well as personhood that includes traces of human embodiment as vestiges of natural law. These layered meanings co-exist and, indeed, coalesce in the idealized figure of the abstract liberal subject of the law. That abstracted ideal masks a normative masculinity in that the law’s rationality supercedes the affective and somatic conditions of embodied existence, according to the gendered Cartesian binary of mind and body. According to Grear, the vulnerable subject, whose vulnerability is both humanly embodied and structurally embedded in the institutions of family, religion, state, and so forth, allows for a fuller expression of human rights legal subjects and their claims. My readings demonstrate that although vulnerability theory opens up analytical frames of compounded vulnerability to heterotemporal and heterospatial representations, it remains difficult to recode vulnerability outside of the gendered normativity of the law. Gendered norms thus pose a particularly trenchant challenge to vulnerability as a more capacious grounding for the human rights subject. The civic epistemologies that develop from this discursive web of human rights norms—produced by fiction, human rights reports, reportage, and legal arguments in relation to lived experience—inform the potential for what I call critical advocacy: a dynamic form of advocacy that reflects critically on its own analytical terms, attends actively to the differentiated material contexts of its subjects, and might generate various local, intra-national, and transnational affiliations in the campaign for justice. Critical advocacy, in the context of compounded vulnerability and toxic exposure, tests the proposition of the generalizability of rights discourse across what Upendra Baxi terms, “geographies of injustice”5—those different spheres in which parallels in structural vulnerability could yield new political affiliations. In addition, critical advocacy illuminates the challenge of generalizable rights discourse across different moments when and where that discourse remains untranslatable or inadequate. Critical advocacy, in other words, attempts to account for both the urgency and the limits of claims for continuing liability with regard to Bhopal, particularly by examining how such claims are or are not generalizable among diverse claimants. I take this concept of the generalizable from Domna Stanton’s important theorization of it as “an attempt to think through non-violent negotiations and transactions of differences and contests, and to shift the focus from a top-down (e.g., from the ‘universal’ in the UDHR) to a bottom-up approach, rooted in various concrete localities, but not bound or limited by them, and moving potentially in ever wider circles of agreement and commonality.”6

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Overexposed  117 The generalizable in this formulation is the careful, contingent, and on-­ going work of tracing elements of commonality and exclusion in the recognition of vulnerability as well as rights claims, and it attests to human rights discourse (and thus to the definition of those claims) as dynamic rather than as static. As opposed to universalism, the generalizable names an approach to the problem of translating rights discourses across different contexts, as well as of defining the scope of rights claims and responsibilities. Stanton emphasizes the importance of generalizability in mediating between the various human rights actors (national and international human rights instruments, the work of NGOs and national human rights institutions, as well as local and transnational organizations), thereby potentially producing a stronger framework for multi-faceted human rights work. Generalizability thus stems from the socio-economic and juridico-political objectives of local campaigns and potentially expands outward to generate new, contingent, and flexible solidarities. Those potential linkages, however, may remain structurally bound within the so-called human rights regime and its conceptual apparatus of liberal subjectivity and historical progress. Given the ongoing legal and advocacy work around “Bhopal,” and the ways in which normative discourses of human rights have failed those exposed to both it and the toxic gas, the question remains whether vulnerability theory can expand the generalizability of human rights. In addition, the analysis that follows addresses whether the kind of generalizability of human rights Stanton defines can contribute to what Upendra Baxi calls a “new jurisprudence of human solidarity in a runaway globalizing world.”7 To put it in terms of the kind of humanities-based approach offered here, this chapter explores whether reading a constellation of local and transnational human rights discourses (including fiction) can contribute to a social imaginary that does not merely amplify neoliberal dominance for an ostensibly secure humanitarian readership, but foster the imagination of new forms of political affiliation geared toward a more equitable future. Although literary, political, and legal analysts have been justly critical of human rights’ geopolitical and biopolitical functions which impose the interests and conceptual apparatus of the Global North over the Global South, the difficulty of clearly delimiting a catastrophe like Bhopal poses a theoretical challenge to those critiques that generalizability and critical advocacy attempt to meet. The challenge is exacerbated by the impossibility of separating human rights from ecological concerns in the era of the Anthropocene, especially when neoliberal forces distribute toxic risks (and its indirect benefits) differentially across the globe and contribute to the growing corporatization of human rights. This chapter traces ways in which discourses of toxicity and compounded vulnerability (like toxicity itself), are marked by conventional geopolitical boundaries, but do not always abide by them. In that regard, this chapter does not attempt to fashion a Global South perspective (as if there could be any such thing) on Bhopal through a particular set of authentic, representative fictions. Rather, I examine three

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118 Overexposed fictions that hail from different parts of the world, defy easy geographic categorization, and, taken together, highlight the stakes of transnational literary analyses of human rights concerns. Both the fiction and the normative human rights discourses reflect the tension between local and global representations of toxic exposure. Finally, the fictions disclose the necessity of gender and cultural difference as key analytics in distinguishing victimhood from imposed and exposed vulnerability. Animal’s People, The Red Book, and Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha imagine “Bhopal” as an event and synecdoche for “disaster capitalism.”8 All three narratives are built out of the tensions between fiction, documentary photography, and reportage, such that they implicitly explore what role, if any, fiction might have in shaping public discourse around the on-going pursuit of justice from the Bhopal disaster. If, as science and technology scholar Sheila Jasanoff argues, Animal’s People, “may have done more to revive international interest in Bhopal, and thus to touch the conscience of the world, than decades of medical or legal action,”9 then this chapter asks how literary fictions are poised between humanitarian gestures and legal and political recourse, as well as in relation to photo and print journalism. More pointedly, I analyze how the fiction participates in the toxic (over) exposure of Bhopalis and structures relationships between survivors, their allies, and the “conscience of the world,” or at least the consumers of certain forms of world literature. Animal’s People takes up the concerns of locals, activists, foreign humanitarian workers and corporate executives in the aftermath of a Bhopal-­ inspired toxic gas leak in the imaginary Khaufpur (“city of terror”). Although Sinha has said the novel is “about people, not about issues” and was never intended as “a polemic,” Bhopal remains a clear referent.10 As activist and journalist Sathyu Sarangi wrote in a plug addressed to colleagues that was formerly on Sinha’s website for the book, “Khaufpur is as close or as far from Bhopal as you want it to be, but I am sure you will enjoy the retelling of the many campaigns that all of you have been a part of and recognize the intricacies and wickedness and resistance in a gassed city.”11 The Union Carbide disaster and the crucial issue of its mediatized representation are also catalysts in Delahunt’s The Red Book and inform Devi’s novella Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. All three texts have garnered international success and wide readership: Animal’s People was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, The Red Book was a finalist for the Orange prize, and Devi’s international audience expanded significantly after Pterodactyl and two other stories were translated by Gayatri Spivak and published as Imaginary Maps. Although such market and critical success reanimates the event in the public imagination, it may do so through the patronizing terms of “literary humanitarianism.” As Joseph Slaughter writes, “In a world where privileges and rights, as well as literary technologies and juridico-institutional resources are unequally distributed, such cosmopolitan reading practices often serve to recenter the traditional subjects of benevolence, humanitarian

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Overexposed  119 interventionist sentimentality, and human rights—the literary agents of an international human rights imaginary.”12 Such literary humanitarianism places the reader in the position of a potential (and perpetual, unrealized) humanitarian, whose sympathetic reading of distant suffering functions as a form of abstracted succor, if not justice, unto itself. This process, of course, relegates the subjects of the text to objects of the reader’s humanitarian concern. The literature, in such instances, serves not solely as a work of imagination, but more powerfully as a form of commodified testimony that conveys and compensates for suffering. Literary humanitarianism, according to Slaughter’s critique, reproduces the liberal subject of rights even as it displaces the political agency of those violated with the implied reader’s distribution of sympathy and concern. The literary fictions under discussion in this chapter wrestle with these dangers: as works that are marketed to a global Anglophone audience, they may fit the model of literary humanitarianism for distant suffering, humanitarianism that also largely flows from the Global North to the Global South; however, they also frame the “eventness” and longue durée of the Bhopal catastrophe in complex chronotopes that refuse any singular geopolitical constituency and at least intimate the importance of intergenerational rights claims. “Eventness,” as Peter Hitchcock defines it, describes a “transnational chronotope [that] does not contend that time’s arrow, a dubious chronologism of ‘post’ as ‘after’ in postcolonialism, confirms the end of colonialism, but rather accentuates the distillation of specific coordinates in its moment.”13 “Eventness” aptly describes Bhopal in a constellation of contexts around the catastrophe of December 3, 1984. From its tangled roots in the history of American corporate involvement in India; to the cooperation between the US Ford Foundation and the State of India in sponsoring the Green Revolution; to the asymmetrical legal codes that allowed a plant to be built in Bhopal without the same levels of safety and citizen notification procedures required for the “sister-plant” in West Virginia; to the neoliberal shift in India just after the assassination of Indira Gandhi; to the local political and religious rivalries that designated certain areas of the city for certain groups, thereby distributing risk according to political patronage and religious belief, it is difficult to craft a single ontology of disaster. Similarly, after the leak occurred, there are multiple reference points for compounded catastrophe: the state’s refusal to authorize treatment for gas exposure with sodium thiosulphate (used to treat cyanide poisoning and found—before it was abruptly banned just days after the disaster—to be effective in treating exposure to MIC); the failure to requisition from Union Carbide medical records on the effects of the gas as well as documentation of its exact chemical composition; and the mobilization of bureaucratically-sanctioned truth-telling conventions to define and quantify victims and their claims (the Process of Injury Evaluations), to name a few. Access to the disputed settlement five years later depended upon the legibility of the subaltern (most victims and survivors were among the poorest, most disenfranchised Bhopalis who lived

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120 Overexposed adjacent to the plant) within the very structures of governmentality through which they had been marginalized and, thus, exposed; and failure of redress rested at least in part on the procedures used to define the medical effects of toxicity for people with no medical records. The scope of Bhopal’s eventness is further complicated by lasting environmental degradation and the now intergenerational claims for medical assistance and environmental clean-up. To explore the implications of hetereogeneous chronotopes in fiction of Bhopal, this chapter examines the texts’ portrayal of gas-affected Bhopalis’ compounded, imposed vulnerability, particularly in relation to the ­overexposed image of the Bhopali child’s burial photographed by Raghu Rai (Fig. 3.1). Rai’s photograph provides a defining image of Bhopal. It is an image both humanitarian campaigns and literary fictions engage, and its depiction of the child’s corpse demands a critical reading of representations of embodied vulnerability in the pursuit of liability claims. I develop a reading of critical advocacy in humanitarian and literary discourse in order to foreground the means through which the goals of continued liability and the regeneration of human rights culture in the face of its corporatization are imagined. Finally, this chapter considers the extent to which these discourses generate wider civic epistemologies at the expense of the local epistemologies and agency of the “Bhopal-violated”14 and through their over-exposure in normative, exclusionary fictions of personhood.

Continuing Liability and Legal Contexts of Bhopal Writing on the occasion of the satirically titled “‘silver jubilee’ of the Bhopal catastrophe,” Baxi identifies six approaches to and three different stages of the event in order to argue for a “democratization of people’s knowledge” to continue to fuel a campaign by the violated against “the assassins of collective memory,” corporate and state impunity, and “hostile human rights.”15 The three temporalities of catastrophe he defines are the night of the explosion, the initial settlement of claims agreed to by the state for 470 million USD, and the lack of substantive state redress for the suffering of Bhopalis that continues. These different moments have yielded responses from advocates with various areas of expertise: disaster response, risk management, technological approaches to environmental management, corporate social responsibility, scientific and business case studies to teach lessons from ­Bhopal, and, finally, what Baxi terms “networks of biomedical, juridical and ethical social action communities.”16 It is in the last approach that the lived experiences and priorities of gas-affected Bhopalis can directly impact the means and goals of campaigns for justice, including determining the extent to which alliances may be forged with those outside the immediate site of the catastrophe and may be informed by scientific, medical, and legal expertise. The circles of liability have been circumscribed in Bhopal’s legal contests by debates over jurisdiction and legal representation. A full accounting

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Overexposed  121 of the terms of international legal liability that could apply in the Bhopal case is outside the purview of this chapter; however, I offer a sketch below of some of the central debates relevant to representations of impunity and liability in the novels. Although important expansions to the conception of international legal liability have occurred in the ensuing decades in other cases, the priority of national sovereignty determined the initial scope of concern in Bhopal. In 1985, just months after the explosion, the Indian Government passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, making the Union of India the representative of all plaintiffs in suits for compensation. This act, which was designed to streamline the legal process, in effect denied Bhopalis the right to speak on their own behalf, transferring their legal standing to the national government (also a stakeholder in Union Carbide of India, Limited) that arguably had contributed to the precaritization of these same populations. In a separate key ruling the following year, Judge Keenan of the US District Court of New York agreed with Union Carbide’s motion to dismiss legal actions on behalf of claimants filed against it in the United States “on the grounds of forum non conveniens,” concluding “the public interest of India in this litigation far outweighs the public interest of the United States. This litigation offers a developing nation the opportunity to vindicate the suffering of its own people within the framework of a legitimate legal system.”17 Commenting on Judge Keenan’s argument on behalf of Indian national sovereignty and his judgment that the events of Bhopal were “local concerns,” in which the United States had “slight interest,” Baxi argues that “the decision is characterized by a morality of avoidance, rather than a concern for justice” (original emphasis) as well as a narrow interpretation of social responsibility.18 Judge Keenan invoked the rhetoric of India’s postcolonial autonomy to avoid the circumstances of US neoliberal responsibility. Significantly, even those discourses of autonomy and responsibility, cornerstones of liberal and neoliberal policies, are ascribed to states as opposed to persons. In this way, legal personhood of gas-affected Bhopalis was effectively erased (by the Bhopal Act) and then reconstituted as a symbolic material of exchange between nations in the ruling by Judge Keenan. Although the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and Union Carbide of India, Ltd (UCIL) agreed in 1989 to the settlement of 470 million USD (resulting in payments averaging 500 USD per victim (for those who could produce the necessary documentation)), neither UCC, UCIL, Dow Chemical (which purchased UCC in 1999), the State Government of Madhya Pradesh (which gave the building and operating permits for the plant), nor the Indian national government (whose Green Revolution called for the production of pesticides such as Sevin) have undertaken an environmental clean-up of the plant site and its surroundings, including the affected water supply, nor have any of these entities provided comprehensive medical care. A central challenge, then, in the decades-long pursuit of justice for Bhopal is the two-pronged problem of drawing figurative temporal and spatial boundaries around the disaster and tracing paths of political, legal,

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122 Overexposed economic, and ethical responsibility within them. This challenge also illuminates the difference between rights and justice: Baxi emphasizes that for “Bhopal-violated activists […] rights-languages were not, for them, important in themselves but only important as a means to the ends of justice.”19 As the fiction suggests, rights are but one means of achieving the restorative and redistributive justice associated with vitality and “co-flourishing.”20 Moreover, the complex network of activists and campaigns involved in this catastrophe refuse any singular discourse of advocacy. The question of balancing campaigns in the name of rights with those for justice, as well as the challenge of imagining of multiple scales of the ­disaster—from immediate and individual suffering to the long reach of toxicity and continuing liability—arise in the discourse of local activists. As Kim Fortun writes in her ethnographic study, Advocacy after Bhopal: Gas victims and those working alongside them have reached for ways to articulate what they want in the wake of the disaster. They want rehabilitation. They want legal judgment of wrongdoing. And they want measures taken that would prevent future Bhopals. Often these demands are articulated in seemingly simple terms—the phrase “We want justice” recurs in the street rallies, in pamphlets, and in the graffiti painted throughout Bhopal. The seeming simplicity of the call for justice is, however, deceptive. Gas victims and their allies seem to know this—often emphasizing their awareness that justice will always be deferred, that there is no way to fully rehabilitate Bhopal. Gas victims’ demand for “continuing liability” articulates this understanding.21 As Fortun’s analysis makes clear, Bhopal has both particular and generalizable meanings in these campaigns. In conjunction, continuing liability has legal and extra-legal dimensions that seemingly demand a responsive national government but also extend beyond the national jurisdiction to include instruments such as the UN Norms. Writing in the Radical History Review, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Takamitsu Ono, and Alka Roy identify key components of “continuing liability” pursued by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal under the umbrella slogan, “We all live in Bhopal”: “polluters must pay for the costs of environmental clean-ups and health care for affected communities; people must be informed of health and environmental risks in their communities; transnational corporations and their officers must be subject to the law in all the countries where they operate; and communities of indigenous people, people of color, and poor people must not be burdened by health and environmental risks not borne by privileged sectors of society.”22 That broad scope of continuing liability, including the more equitable distribution of vulnerability, far exceeds existing legal judgments, yet it speaks to the need to transform frameworks within which human rights violations become legible, especially those that facilitate the corporatization of human

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Overexposed  123 rights. In place of a conventional definition of international human rights law, which defines the obligations of states to individuals and the rights of individuals vis-à-vis the state, and which holds states accountable to one another for any violations, continuing liability calls for the expanding role of non-state actors as key players in the distribution and protection of human rights. Continuing liability is particularly crucial to advocacy efforts in the context of toxicity, such as in Bhopal, where the parameters of eventness are not wholly commensurable with those of the state. Arguments for continuing liability can thus be seen as examples of the kind of grassroots-directed generalizability Stanton advocates or as invitations for the continued expansion of dominant human rights institutions’ role as “gatekeepers.”23 John Dale locates the intersection of these competing interests (individual sufferers of violations, corporate and state actors, non-governmental advocacy organizations) in a transnational legal space, which is “a contested terrain of legal discourse.”24 Upon this legal terrain, “the discourses [are] constructed at the interstices of existing state legal systems that identify institutional arrangements of legal mechanisms that present opportunities for making crimes or torts committed in one state actionable in the legal system of another state” (original emphasis).25 More broadly, questions of who has legal standing in which courts and of liability are contested in these kinds of cases in relation to ever-shifting norms of discourse and social practice of state and non-state actors, particularly in bringing tort law to bear on human rights, as in Bhopal. The landmark case, Doe v. Unocal (2005), illustrates how, in the decades since Bhopal, the principle of liability for corporate disaster across national lines as well as the scope of human rights law continues to evolve. In Doe v. Unocal, peasants from Burma’s ethnic minorities, who had been conscripted by the military dictatorship to work on Unocal’s construction of a gas pipeline, brought suit against the corporation in the United States for human rights violations, including slavery, rape, torture, and murder. Dale analyzes how the Burmese plaintiffs, working with American attorneys and the Free Burma Movement, transformed the transnational legal space by using the US Alien Tort Claims Act [ATCA] (1789) to file their claim. Several of the case’s key characteristics are relevant to Bhopal: the right of the foreign plaintiffs to be heard in US court, the use of the ATCA to prosecute human rights violations, and the legal liability of a transnational corporation as a person before the law for violations committed in a foreign country. Unocal’s settlement of the case (to preempt a verdict) in 2005 underscored the efficacy of this legal strategy. As Dale notes, “had the court been left to decide the case, and had it ruled in favor of the peasants (an outcome that Unocal clearly thought was likely), it would have been the first time that foreigners had won a case against a transnational corporation in a US court for an injury that took place in another country.”26 Without ignoring the different material circumstances and histories of Union Carbide in Bhopal and Unocal’s Yadana Project in Burma, the frames of justice bear some comparison. Whereas Judge Keenan argued

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124 Overexposed in favor of Indian judicial sovereignty in his ruling, the court in Doe v. Unocal recognized the ATCA’s commitment to the “law of nations,” particularly the jus cogens or highest principles of that law from which no derogation is permitted by any state. These principles address such crimes as slavery, genocide, war crimes, and torture, as well as the “gross violation of internationally recognized human rights.”27 In other words, whereas Judge Keenan made his crucial Bhopal ruling through the logic of competing national interests (which effectively displaced Bhopalis’ embodied suffering in favor of deferring to, and thus protecting, Indian legal sovereignty), the Unocal case activated the higher principle of the law of nations and universal human rights norms, although it did so through a mechanism or framework provided by US law. Unocal v. Doe is an example of the successful expansion of tort law for the pursuit of human rights as well as for the continuing liability of corporations as opposed to individuals or state actors. Indeed, one of the debates within the case took place over whether domestic or international standards of liability, “based on direct and active participation” in the crime or “on aiding and abetting abusive human rights practices,” respectively, should apply.28 Despite the many parallels between the two cases, perhaps more challenging are their differences, specifically the legibility of the crime itself as a violation of the higher principles of jus cogens. The Unocal case focused primarily on the uncontroversial citation of the protection against slavery as a fundamental, non-derogatable human right. In Bhopal, activists and lawyers have faced the challenge of making the compounded, imposed vulnerabilities of those who lived in the shadow of the Union Carbide plant—including the socio-economic disparities at the heart of the catastrophe—­comprehensible as gross violations of international human rights. This points to the larger problem of how development programs can produce vulnerable populations, often in the name of economic human rights (in this case, the right to development and food self-­sufficiency through India’s Green Revolution, a revolution that also facilitated the expansion of the corporate, legal and political interests of agribusiness over small farmers). Although the outcome of Doe v. Unocal signified a victory for the principle of continuing liability, it did not set an unassailable precedent. More recently, in a case concerning alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by Royal Dutch Petroleum in Nigeria, the US Supreme Court decided unanimously in its review of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell) in 2013 to limit the scope of the ATCA, notwithstanding the clarity of violations of jus cogens. As reported by The Economist, the court’s ruling “holds that the ATS [Alien Tort Statute] does not apply to actions committed by foreign companies, and noted a strong presumption against applying American law outside the United States. ‘There is no indication,’ wrote John R ­ oberts, the chief justice, ‘that the ATS was passed to make the United States a uniquely hospitable forum for the enforcement of international norms.’”29 Chief Justice Roberts’s phrasing replaces the extra-national commitment to jus

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Overexposed  125 cogens with hospitality, and his ruling favors the interests of the state over international norms. The Center for Constitutional Rights also notes, citing the decision, that the presumption against applying the ATS “can be overcome when the matter ‘touches and concerns’ the United States with ‘sufficient force.’”30 The decision leaves open the process of developing legal norms that will define the scope of legal liability of future cases; however, it also suggests that the development of those norms will be shaped first and foremost by national interest as opposed to continuing liability rooted in broader concepts of shared vulnerability or social responsibility and liability. Chief Justice Roberts’ decision discloses the human rights potential of the ATCA as an instrument of strategic governance wielded at the discretion and to serve the interests of the powerful.

The Mediatization of Bhopal Developing norms to inform ethical imperatives of intergenerational justice and transnational corporate responsibility—the kinds of imperatives called for in the case of Bhopal—depends upon complex forms of advocacy within both law and culture. These concerns bring to mind Nancy Fraser’s threepart theory of justice, expanded in Scales of Justice, which she summarizes in terms of recognition, representation, and redistribution.31 Fraser’s title captures the double meaning of the classical depiction of Justice balancing her scales and of contemporary challenges of adjudicating among varying “competing frames for organizing, and resolving, justice conflicts.”32 My focus is on Fraser’s second category, representation, as a contested domain whose possible framing is determined by biopolitical and geopolitical logics. For people living outside of Bhopal, representation of the disaster occurred first through national and international news media, and the reportage of the explosion tended to confirm existing civic epistemologies rather than to challenge them. Pablo Mukherjee details the coverage by the Indian media, noting it “reported the dizzying numbers of casualties, and then the structural failures of Union Carbide that had led to the disaster.”33 This kind of reporting produces narratives of corporate malfeasance; however, it elides the role of the national government as a Union Carbide of India (UCIL) stakeholder and limits critical discussion of the Green Revolution in the context of Indian national development. In contrast, according to the study by Lee Wilkins of US television, print media, and news wire coverage of Bhopal from 3 December 1984 to 3 February 1985, American reporting, although not uniform, tended to treat the disaster as an inexplicable, decontextualized event that reinforced the unknowability of both techno-science and of the undifferentiated mass of victims.34 Delimited “event-centered” reporting elided “long-range questions of, first, planning and resource allocation which play a significant role in mitigating the impact of both natural and technological hazards” and, second, of medical and environmental health.35

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126 Overexposed From US media perspectives, gas exposure and poisoning seemed to be a matter of chance or happenstance, as opposed to being products distributed by the very economic, political, and scientific-technological forces that contributed to the disaster itself. Notably, photographs of children’s corpses, such as those discussed below which were published in India and internationally, elicited an emotional reaction in part because they confirmed the seemingly random distribution of suffering. The photographs worked in conjunction with the tone of US news reporting, which largely portrayed “people as victims rather than sources of information, institutions as the powerful actors in the event, not only in terms of possessing information but also in terms of their ability to influence events, and a dominance of underlying themes of helplessness.”36 When evidence of catastrophic suffering registers as evidence of complete helplessness, the agency of the subjects dissolves in favor of that of the s­ afely-anchored gaze or the experts to whom the camera or reporter turns. Such reporting reinforces normative human rights that “operate as a technology of governmentality […] via experts” (original emphasis), as Bal Sokhi-Bolley has argued, rather than via claimants themselves.37 It empties rights claims of political agency for the claimants and seeks humanitarian assistance in its place. This shaping of the civic sphere, Wilkins notes, is “profoundly undemocratic for it removes citizens from those questions which have an immense capacity to influence their lives and the lives of their children.”38 In other words, the reporting by US media generally defined a narrow civic sphere of Bhopalis’ toxic exposure, a sphere in which suffering the effects of the gas appeared to be anonymous, distant, and unrelatable except through channels of pity as “grand emotion.”39 Potential transnational currents of responsibility and liability and a larger civic sphere were also foreclosed by the US media’s focus on ­American political reactions and the effects of the disaster on Union Carbide’s corporate health, rather than media investigations into a more complicated history of shared risk and technological and economic gain. On December 3, 1994, the tenth anniversary of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, the London Guardian and Observer ran a double-page spread that initiated the Bhopal Medical Appeal. Indra Sinha, who was then an award-winning advertising copywriter, developed the appeal, which featured the iconic photograph of the Bhopali child’s burial (Fig. 3.1) alongside extensive text. With subsequent appeals, the campaign raised enough funds to create the Sambhavan Trust and its Sambhavna [Medical] Clinic in Bhopal. Opened in 1996, the clinic describes its efforts to offer increased and enhanced medical care for gas-affected Bhopalis: it provides free allopathic and ayurvedic medical and psychiatric care to gas victims, conducts research on the lasting effects of chemical gas poisoning, and, according to its website (www.bhopal.org), has treated more than 30,000 patients and is now in its second, expanded facility. Its international funding has also made it controversial, with some activist groups campaigning against its use on the grounds that it further absolves the state from its fundamental

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Overexposed  127 responsibilities toward its citizens. The Bhopal Medical Appeal itself, notable for both its photographs and the full page of text that accompanied each image, is lauded as one of the most successful humanitarian appeals ever in print-media. The appeal also serves as the nexus between Sinha’s work in advertising and his subsequent career as a novelist, most notably as the author of Animal’s People. Animal’s People, The Red Book, and Pterodactyl share a common root in Rai’s photograph of the Bhopali child’s burial. Best known for his work in lush, large-format books such as Dreams of India, Indira Gandhi: A Living Legacy, and, more recently, Raghu Rai’s India: Reflections in Colour, Rai was among the first photographers to document the gas leak in Bhopal, and his work has circulated widely in news media and in subsequent human rights campaigns. The image in Fig. 3.1 may be the single-most recognized image of Bhopal.

Figure 3.1  Burial of an unknown child. INDIA. Bhopal. 1984. ©Raghu Rai/ Magnum Photos. Reprinted by permission.

The Bhopali child’s burial, as Rob Godden of the Rights Exposure Project writes, works “through a classic witnessing approach—the presenting of evidence through black and white images using a documentary-style aesthetic.”40 Read in the context of either news reports of the disaster or humanitarian appeals such as Sinha’s, the photo underscores the tragedy of the disaster through the portrayal of one of its most defenseless victims, one whose plight seems to persist even in death in the gravel grave. The caressing hand at the top of the child’s head bespeaks loss and mourning, yet also provides a point of identification for the viewer as a synecdoche for humanitarian assistance. At the same time, the circumstances of that gesture limit the role of assistance to grieving: it points to what has been lost rather than to the possibility of future action.

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128 Overexposed The circulation of two other similar images, by Pablo Bartholomew and Suara Sam of the Delhi Forum, attest to the emotive power of the burial while also adding to the sense that these are, in Ann Larabee’s analysis of disaster imagery, “carefully composed totemic image[s], a death mask, rising from the earth as if from an archeological dig.”41 Pablo Bartholomew’s 1995 World Press Award photograph varies slightly from Rai’s. Increasing the viewer’s proximity to the child’s corpse, the angle is sidelong, only the top of the small form is pictured, and the hand is pointing rather than caressing. These changes amplify the photos’ function as shorthand for anonymous suffering in that the image is almost completely decontextualized and the perspective works against identification: the message is violation without explication. As Larabee writes, “This level of abstraction from the living context […] give[s] an illusion of intimacy while placing any suffering at a safe and controllable distance.”42 Both images suggest poverty and the need for a hasty burial, a social crisis that can turn an ostensibly private moment into a public spectacle, and the presence of adults as witnesses (through the adult hand in the photographs and the implicit presence of the photographer and then the viewer) with an ill-defined relationship toward the small subject. Although the disfigured eyes suggest that this was not a “natural” death, nothing else in the photo endows the body with individuality, locale, or cause of death. Out of context, both photographs can only serve—through an emotional appeal based on a shared assumption of the idealized innocence of the victim—extremely limited evidentiary functions of the unnatural, and therefore unjust, suffering and loss of a child. In place of contextual referents to define a political scope of the catastrophe, the photographs alone offer evidence and an appeal based upon an ostensibly universal feeling of sorrow for the death of the child. In juxtaposition to a news story, the child then stands in for gas-affected Bhopalis more generally, thereby reproducing colonial ideologies of the Western gaze upon its infantilized “third world” objects. In the Bhopal Medical Appeal series in the London papers, photojournalistic images proffered the human face of disaster, accompanied by strong, pseudo-journalistic storylines in a humanitarian campaign that ultimately transformed its copywriter into a novelist. The first appeal begins with the description of the famous photograph on the facing page: A man is burying a child. He has laid the tiny body in a shallow grave and begun to cover it. Then, unable to bear the thought that he will never see her again, he brushes the earth from his child’s face for one last look. The photographer, Raghu Rai of Magnum, cried as he took the picture. Note the transition from the father to the photographer in modeling the reader’s proper reaction, while the added information about the victim’s

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Overexposed  129 gender reconfirms the paternalistic coding of the gaze. The text continues with examples of the suffering of Bhopalis, an indictment of the failure of corporate and state responsibility for victims’ care over the past decade, and a direct appeal to the reader for aid. Momentum builds toward a moral argument for responsibility based upon the principle of shared, yet differentiated humanity. The narrative moves from the third-person description of distant suffering to a direct address of increasing urgency—from “If you have ever been to India” to “But what if you don’t have medical records?” to “Maybe you believe that, morally, it is Union Carbide that should pay for the medical care.” And it concludes with the moral claim of a common humanity that nonetheless retains the distinctions between safe versus vulnerable worlds, between would-be donors and victims. This is particularly evident in the slide in the interpellations and invitations of that “you”: first addressed as a tourist, then in an invitation for identification, and finally as a humanitarian whose generosity compensates for corporate greed. The appeal ends with the promise of the solidarity of good feelings, produced through self-congratulatory humanitarianism: “If after reading their story we turn the page, we will demonstrate that there is no humanity either. We must help them because no one else will.”43 The rhetoric reasserts a moral universalism based upon “the articulation of justice with pity”44 to reward compassion that itself depends upon a fractured humanity: the continuation of structural inequalities between the privileged “we” of the address and “they” who suffer. Morality itself belongs to the privileged “we” who can choose whether or not to bestow beneficence upon those who are incapable of such choice on their own behalf, much less that of others. The notably successful address of the Bhopal Medical Appeal is made possible by the blurring of genres, the contextualization of photo-realism within humanitarian rhetoric.45 Most importantly, the force of the appeal depends upon an image of the rights-lessness of Bhopalis, powerfully represented by the dead child who signifies the truncated history, feminization and racial othering, and moral and political incapacity of the dispossessed.

Critical Advocacy and Compounded Vulnerability in Fiction The defining image of the Bhopali child’s burial, in the reportage, humanitarian appeals, and as a common link among all three works of fiction, as discussed below, can also introduce the problematic of corpus delicti: “this ‘body or substance of a crime which ordinarily includes two elements: the act and the criminal agency of the act.’”46 Thomas Laqueur points out that “the corpus became a corpus delicti, an articulate witness to a crime in the context of human rights, only when crimes against humanity or genocide became crimes,” a process aided by the mass circulation of photographic evidence.47 This historical connection between cultural and legal developments remains important as both the human rights regime and the novel as literary standard-bearer continue to evolve (particularly under pressures

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130 Overexposed from transnational circuits of capital, law, and letters).48 Perhaps the bestknown contemporary novel to take up the challenge of corpus delicti, of transforming the corpse into witness to launch a human rights narrative, is Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000). In the novel, the dangerous work of piecing together a history for a corpse unearthed in a government-controlled area during Sri Lanka’s long civil war builds the narrative tension to support the claim that “[t]o give him a name would name the rest.”49 Uncovering and composing, as forensic and narrative acts, are difficult to separate in the novel, and both strain under the weight borne by a singular identity to serve both the pursuit of justice and what Laqueur calls “the interests of memory, of narrative closure, of healing, of reconciliation.”50 Ondaatje presents the pursuit of justice and the fruits of mourning by gradually building evidence of the corpse Sailor’s history and identity (the novel contextualizes Sailor in the fictional world of the novel as well as among names of Sri Lankan civil war dead culled from actual Amnesty International lists). At the same time, Sailor’s identity is central to achieving closure for the central characters, who are otherwise unrelated to him: the UN investigator and Sri Lankan expatriate Anil, the local forensic archeologist Sarath, his physician brother Gamini, and the local sculptor Ananda. Although the novel does not call into question the frame that Anil, Sarath, and Ananda construct around Sailor out of artistic, medical, and archeological evidence, it does highlight ways in which other interpretative professions such as religious ritual may derive meaning from historical frames that are longer than the more immediate history of the civil war. For Laqueur, it is the tension between the different temporalities of two discourses—the rhetoric of justice and the rhetoric of memory—that is cause for concern, as the trope of corpus delicti makes it possible for narrative closure and memorialization to substitute for continued legal action to prosecute criminal agency. Critics of Anil’s Ghost’s pronounced aesthetics—as a betrayal of postcolonial (i.e., oppositional political) sensibilities—echo Laqueur’s argument about the privatization of suffering through the rhetorics of memory and mourning. As critical debate about the novel’s political intentions has reflected, the construction of a literary corpus delicti, especially through a lyrical narrative style, has implications beyond the expression of universal human rights or the cultivation of humanitarian sentiment (in the vein of Richard Rorty or Martha Nussbaum). Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps summarize how scholarly criticism of Anil’s Ghost brings into sharp relief the larger debate over key tenets of postcolonial studies—“that postcolonial literature must deal with the politics of identity defined in terms of ethnicity, race, and nation; that novels should tell the truth about their referent and their origin, even mimetically so”—as well as the problematic assumptions that inform these directives.51 Within studies of human rights and literature in a postcolonial context, the “problem” of representational authenticity as necessary for political change is clearly at odds with both poststructuralist and materialist underpinnings of the field.

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Overexposed  131 Although the fictions under consideration here complicate the category of postcolonial literature, they wrestle with the same issue of how narrative style might convey, foreclose, or reframe questions of criminal and social liability in a the context of transnational corporate power and the postcolonial state that is embracing neoliberal policies. When the evidentiary components of the Bhopal Medical Appeal (the documentary photograph, the journalistic report) cathect fiction of Bhopal, they operate in two distinct ways: In the narrative realism of The Red Book, photography becomes a source of libidinal investment that encourages a reader’s identification with the characters and their suffering. In the case of mythic and magical realism in Pterodactyl and Animal’s People, respectively, photographic and journalistic interventions illuminate the politics of representation and the incommensurables of translation, as opposed to authentic cultural identities. Rai’s photograph shadows all three works, each time raising the question of what the child was vulnerable to and how the now over-exposed image transmits vulnerability into other contexts. When the child it features is framed to be the victim of an incomprehensible, unlocatable disaster, rather than the witness to a crime, the image is severed from conditions of precarity that attended the death and becomes a free-floating metaphor for the suffering of others. The literary fiction references that suffering in different ways. Whereas The Red Book employs the image to spur readerly humanitarianism and the personal growth of the primary characters, Pterodactyl and Animal’s People ask readers to take a more critical stance toward the foundational assumptions of their own humanitarian sensibilities. At stake in all three literary texts is the struggle between civic epistemologies as those “shared understandings of what credible claims should look like, and how they ought to be articulated, represented, and defended in public domains.”52 These competing claims continue to structure campaigns for social justice, legal compensation, and medical care for Bhopalis as well as mechanisms for (voluntary) corporate responsibility. How might fiction shape civic epistemologies, particularly in as contested a context as Bhopal? How do the authors portray historical entanglements (in Mbembe’s sense) as well as the expansion of capitalist modernity in the context of one of its most horrific by-products? How might the “singular and unverifiable” pull of fiction open up the possibilities of critical advocacy, of staging claims for continuing liability to a broad audience while reflecting critically, metatextually, that audience’s relationship to the violations?53 Who might be interpellated by the texts into the civic sphere—a sphere marked by differentiations of participants’ vulnerability to one another? These questions become all the more powerful and poignant in the face of decades of labyrinthine legal maneuvering, political action and inaction tied to local and national party politics, street protests, strikes, and long-distance marches, and of course the on-going social, medical and environmental effects of the catastrophe. One might expect that the answers depend on a combination of evidentiary details, deep character development, and tropes of sentimentality that

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132 Overexposed activate a reader’s desire to care about the suffering of an (imaginary) other. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues on behalf of the literary imagination’s contribution to public deliberation through “the ability to imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstance, be oneself or one of one’s loved ones” as well as the development of “moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.”54 Sinha and Devi, by focusing on local people, create characters where there were isolated illnesses, pasts in the absence of medical records against which to verify one’s pre-exposure health, and myths that provide a counterpoint to the rhetorics of science and governmentality which have so obviously failed those affected by the gas; however, both texts actively resist the kind of sympathetic and identificatory reading Nussbaum describes. The thick, local description depicts particularities of compounded, imposed vulnerability, and it does so in order to make available for scrutiny, rather than to naturalize, the terms through which vulnerability becomes legible. Delahunt takes a different approach, invoking Bhopal less in its local particularities than as a catalyst for the intersecting, affective lives of a Scottish traveler, Australian photographer, and Tibetan orphan. The circuitry of transnational representation and consumption which activates the fiction risks recharging global inequalities, ignoring local micro-politics in favor of the aesthetic preferences of distant consumers, and eliding the fact that a humanitarian appeal may be made to the very populations who benefit directly or indirectly from the legal and economic asymmetries that factored into the disaster in Bhopal and its legal outcomes. Humanitarian identification with a character who has suffered wrongs, or with the character who bestows assistance, may also substitute for the more radical re-imagination of what constitutes human rights and who can claim them as well as who bears responsibility for their violation. Reading for critical advocacy provides an alternative interpretative process that continually reflects back on the selective constitution of the subjects of and liabilities for human rights violations. Rob Nixon has written of Animal’s People, “Sinha’s approach […] throws into relief a political violence both intimate and distant, unfolding over time and space on a variety of scales, from the cellular to the transnational, the corporeal to the global corporate.”55 How the three texts represent these scaling chronotopes illuminates the seductions of liberal subjectivity within human rights discourses, as well as alternatives grounded in vulnerability. Following Kim Fortun’s definition of advocacy “as a performance of ethics in anticipation of a future,” the remainder of this chapter examines how literary fiction constructs civic epistemologies and the persons who populate them in relation to discourses of reportage, science, and legal expertise. Critical advocacy in literary fiction of Bhopal places the evidentiary work of the reporter and photographer in conversation with overtly imaginative writing. In this way, neither the evidence nor its emotional and political

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Overexposed  133 effects can be read as self-evident. The various literary techniques do not invalidate the evidence of human suffering and wrongdoing by equating it with the “merely” fictional or render suffering itself fantastical; rather these techniques underscore the ways in which human rights discourses of all forms produce fictions of personhood that are mediated and may become mediatized. What emerges from this conversation is the key role of gender and cultural difference in framing representations of either victimhood or precarity that can be mobilized. In addition, tracing these fictions reveals the perhaps surprising potential of non-realist literature in particular to generate an ethos in support of continuing liability. Imagining the possibility of continuing liability “calls upon us to question the order of things […] to rethink how the past should be built into the future,” as Fortun describes advocacy. Critical advocacy builds on this “project that is interminably recursive, running back over history again and again, reaching for new ways to figure the future differently;”56 and it analyzes the tug between the impulses to document and to imagine that drives all three narratives, as well as the terms through which these impulses are realized. Critical advocacy thus provides an approach to reading overlapping fictions of Bhopal without reproducing humanitarianism predicated on the same imbalances implicit in the disaster itself.

The Limits of Compassion in The Red Book Rai’s photograph of the child’s burial launches the plot of The Red Book. “It began with a photograph. The sound and the feel of it. Raghu Rai’s photo of the child in the dirt. This is what led me to India,” begins Françoise, an Australian photographer. The image, which “hints at your future,”57 is inspirational: it provides the catalyst for her journey, her photography, and the relationships she builds twenty years after the disaster. As in Animal’s People, the impetus to document the after-effects of the Bhopal catastrophe structures the story, with chapters as the subtext to an imaginary photo album that gives The Red Book its title. The novel-as-album keeps the story of Bhopal alive to perform the recursive work of advocacy Fortun describes. As the epigraph states, “To touch an album is to put it back into motion; to turn the pages is an ongoing story.” However, advocacy is relegated to the private sphere when the photography and narrative of the long reach of the Bhopal disaster are made the domestic inheritance of Françoise’s unborn daughter. Françoise is the main focalizer of the narrative, and she, along with the two other narrators, Naga (a Tibetan Buddhist monk) and Arkay (a Scottish traveler, sometime Buddhist monk, and heroin addict), are far removed from ordinary Bhopalis. In a novel composed of their three alternating voices and driven by character development and interiority, “Bhopal” can seem like a metonym for suffering in general. As the events of December 3, 1984 in Bhopal ripple outward to shape the lives of seemingly unconnected strangers, the reader’s attention remains focused on the individual growth of the peripatetic Françoise. The novel concludes with her promise to give the

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134 Overexposed photo album she has assembled as “the stories of how you came to be” to the daughter she is carrying from her liaison with Arkay.58 Although the novel offers a rich set of references to Bhopal, the narrative trajectory from the Bhopali child’s burial to the birth of the Australian photographer’s daughter is troubling. Painstaking analogies connect the darkroom, “a womb-black space [,] a place of high expectation and high disappointment,” with Françoise’s own motherhood, and with her “weeping for all mothers” in ways that further erase the specific context of Rai’s photograph.59 The photograph itself is not included in the novel, so as a referent it depends upon the reader’s familiarity with or imagination of the image. In either case, the narrative aligns the reader’s perspective initially with Françoise’s through the first-person narration of her sections as well as the trope of the album containing Rai’s and then her photographs. The direct address of Françoise’s sections of the novel also propels the address into the presumptive future, in which the reader’s perspective shifts to that of the daughter, who together look back to Bhopal to understand their now-aligned, present conditions. On one level, if the novel provides the captions to the album in the logic of the text, then the context of Rai’s photograph shifts from the public media representation of a disaster of global importance to a personal and highly aestheticized beginning to Françoise’s story of “how I met your dad.” The novel-as-album ostensibly bridges the distance between the character and reader on one hand and the Bhopal catastrophe on the other. However, if the photograph’s lack of particularity grounds the imagination of the future anterior, then the novel suggests “Bhopal” provides an empty frame within which to construct or to recognize one’s own reflection. The importance of the Bhopali child’s burial photograph as the narrative spark in The Red Book shifts attention away from the material context of the image and toward its power as a free-floating signifier of loss which may be easily appropriated. Attention in the novel is galvanized by the child’s corpse and then quickly refocuses on the ways in which often exoticized images of India impact Françoise. Even the photographer’s power to shape events and to create narratives dissipates as she emphasizes her intuition, instinctive reach for the camera, desire for subjects “to be the narrators of their own lives,” and her “surrender [of] control” in her own work.60 This description of Françoise’s work naturalizes Rai’s photograph as well, masking imposed and compounded vulnerability with a representation of the subject’s absolute victimhood and incapacity. In “Humanitarian Reading,” Joseph Slaughter offers an alternative to the reader’s identification with those who bear human rights abuses either directly or secondarily as witnesses in favor of “a kind of grammatical empathy that invites us to project ourselves […] into the position of the humanitarian, the subject position of one who already recognizes the human dignity of the wounded and attempts to relieve their suffering.”61 Wary of humanitarian concern that depends upon the continuation of structural inequalities

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Overexposed  135 in a “donor-recipient” model, Slaughter reads J. Henry Dunant’s A Memory of Solferino (a foundational text of the International Committee for the Red Cross) for the way in which “the affective structure of the humanitarian triangle implicitly recognizes the philosophical and practical limits of our generous imaginings,” and in its conclusion asks readers to identify not with the soldiers dying on the battlefield but with the horse who picks its way gingerly around the bodies, regardless of their nationality, to do no harm.62 The Red Book also conveys a theme of undifferentiating compassion, although compassion renders continuing liability a private rather than public concern (devoid of the spirit of political mobility embedded in advocacy). In addition, idealized motherhood, both concrete and abstracted, becomes a substitute for humanitarian action in a civic sphere. Without any recognition of “the philosophical and practical limits of our generous imaginings,” this substitution is in keeping with the novel’s Buddhist-inspired message of compassion, often articulated in classic Buddhist texts through the projection of a mother-child relationship onto all who suffer, through eons of rebirths.63 For instance, the “Thirty-Seven Practices of the Bodhissatva” (a compassionate person who foregoes nirvana, or escape from the endless cycle of birth, suffering, and death, in order to help others; also sometimes used colloquially to refer to a selfless humanitarian) by Ngulchu Thogme Zangpo, contains two key verses (translated by Garchen Rinpoche): When mothers who have been kind to one since beginningless time are suffering, what’s the use of one’s own happiness? Therefore, generating the mind of enlightenment in order to liberate limitless sentient beings is the Bodhisattvas’ practice. (Verse 10) Even if someone for whom one has cared as lovingly as one’s own child regards one as an enemy, to cherish that person as dearly as a mother does an ailing child is the Bodhisattvas’ practice. (Verse 16) Ethical reasoning consistent with this model of compassion develops in the novel in response to the Bhopal disaster. It brings Naga, whose family perished in the Union Carbide explosion, to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery as a boy; he then teaches Arkay and eventually Françoise to practice through meditation and mindfulness in daily life. At the center of the book, Naga, who returned immediately after the disaster from Delhi (where he worked as a young domestic) to Bhopal to search for his family, collapses on the steps of a Buddhist monastery and dreams a story for Rai’s Bhopali child’s burial. The passage concludes in the imaginary voice of the newborn, coming now from the grave and mourning the death of its mother: “There is no one left to claim me.”64 (132). The dream endows the Bhopali child with a capacity to witness; however, instead of disclosing a crime in the terms of corpus delicti, witnessing yields only private grief and maternal failure. Within the narrative trajectory of the novel, however, Naga claims the child in his own awakening to Tibetan Buddhism in which he can occupy first the

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136 Overexposed child and then the mother’s role that is lost to the body in the photograph. When Naga awakens on the steps of the monastery, after failing to locate his family among the victims, and tells the monks his dream, the monks nurture and raise him. Later as a monk himself, he can offer the same unstinting care to others whom he meets, including tending to his sister as she dies from uterine cancer linked to the gas, and to Arkay in his death from addiction. The narrative traces Naga’s transformation from child domestic servant to Buddhist monk and maternal agent and is in keeping with the novel’s theme of “modern” Buddhism as a universalized response to suffering, or as spiritual rather than religious practice; however, the redistribution of maternal agency takes place largely at the expense of both Tibetan and Indian women—in the logic of the plot, their erasure is necessary to provide a catalyst for the monk’s maternal agency. This trajectory further detracts from the specificities of Bhopal. The intimate tableau creates, as Indra Sinha writes in a blurb for The Red Book’s back cover, “a compassionate, gracefully observed and moving story of three exiles whose meeting far from home brings a kind of healing to all of them.” At the same time, questions of justice and advocacy remain outside of the purview of “the Bodhissatva’s practice,” especially after Arkay dies and the photo album becomes the inheritance of his daughter. Compassion, rather than human rights, is generalizable in the novel, while the rightslessness of Bhopalis renders them invisible behind the totalizing image of Rai’s photograph. In the other two works, Sinha and Devi keep a skeptical distance from humanitarianism as either charity or maternal compassion. In doing so, they assiduously avoid the sentimental, as well as the consistent lure of realism. These literary choices make available for greater scrutiny the politics of representation through which the texts’ civil epistemologies are constructed.

Embodied, Compounded Vulnerability and Toxic Exposure in Animal’s People The organizing trope of Animal’s People is its eponymous protagonist’s dictation of his story into a tape recorder left him by an enterprising Australian journalist, who has already signed a book deal based on Animal’s story. Animal, whose name suggests his social position as well as his twisted spine caused by exposure to the toxic gas, provides a street-level perspective on the town’s least privileged residents, local campaigns for legal justice, and the arrival of an American doctor who opens a free medical clinic to the great suspicion of residents of Khaufpur. The journalist serves as the necessary conduit of the subaltern’s story to a potentially humanitarian readership, though Animal himself mocks future readers’ “hunger” for his story65 and the spectacularization of suffering in conventional mediatized portrayals. The journalistic frame at once authorizes the text and masks Sinha’s own hand (although, to be sure, some reviewers have found it clumsy). At the same time, Animal’s voice continually draws attention to those structures

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Overexposed  137 through his insistence on telling the story on his own terms and through direct addresses to the journalist/reader as an interlocutor. In keeping with the Bhopal Medical Appeal’s combination of fictional and evidentiary discourses, the novel also slyly references Rai’s work and other documentary sources. In 2001, Rai was invited by Greenpeace to return to Bhopal to photograph evidence of the persisting effects of the gas leak, in preparation for a rights campaign on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster. His photos from this trip maintain a documentary approach, though the aesthetic of suffering in his images has changed. These photos provide greater context for each focal point. Perspective and chronotopes are longer and wider in images of the abandoned factory, people at gravesites, family members, and rallies—all of which convey the message of continuing liability in more communal and materially grounded terms. The debilitating effects of toxicity are made visible in social relationships and social institutions, as opposed to the isolated and abstracted view of suffering and death in his earlier photo. This second set of images also contains a photograph of fetuses spontaneously aborted by women who were exposed to the gas leak. Rai’s caption notes that the fetuses were “preserved by Dr. Satpathy, a forensic expert at the State Government’s Hamida Hospital, to establish the exact cause of death.”66 No doubt among the most shocking of Rai’s photographs, the image, which has appeared on humanitarian websites for Bhopal-related causes and referentially in Animal’s People, uses the city of Bhopal as the backdrop for the jars, which are lined up on what appears to be a rooftop or terrace wall. Despite the larger geographical context provided, compared to the image of the child’s body in Rai’s earlier photo, the message seems to be one of outrage or horror intended to galvanize the viewer, rather than of investigation meant to provide evidence for rights or other claims. The visual relationality between foreground and background do not translate easily into an explanation of why the jars are positioned so dramatically before and above the postcard view of the city’s mosque and skyline (which reinforces the viewers’ reassuring sense of distance from the image), as well as far from the scientific purpose for which they were kept. Fiction intercedes in these spaces, too (spaces which, in the photograph’s original context, the Greenpeace campaign could bridge in supplying a narrative of corporate liability). This later photograph haunts the novel in Animal’s regular conversations with his imaginary friend or khã, a two-headed fetus in a jar he saw as a child in the doctor’s office. Invoking past, present, and a foreclosed future, Animal’s khã also references the on-going reports from Bhopal of higher than average rates of miscarriages and birth defects attributed by many to chemical exposure and ground water contamination. The spontaneously aborted fetus as a character implies the necessity of reading human rights violations in the context of the longue durée of environmental toxicity. However, as opposed to the depiction of feminized, violated innocence in Rai’s first photograph, Animal’s khã is masculinized, uncouth, unnatural, and monstrous.

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138 Overexposed It disrupts the colonizing gaze of pity and humanitarianism by calling out the reader’s (and initially Animal’s) desire to avert one’s eyes, but it also calls for the end of its own specularity. Animal’s khã repeatedly asks to be destroyed on the grounds that it has no future and serves only to distract viewers from what should matter. In Animal’s People, the shock value of Animal’s khã is mediated by the explanation that it is a psychic residue from Animal’s traumatic childhood trip to the doctor, where he saw the preserved fetuses and was told that he could not be cured of his spinal deformity. The khã signals one pole of the binary between deformity, spectacle, and ­abandonment—versus the proper, restored body that the American physician Elli promises surgery will provide, a body that comes closer to the ideal of the liberal subject of the law. It is only when Animal accidently drops the jar—and the khã becomes just matter—that he can imagine an alternative to those two, false choices of positive versus negative personhood. Whereas The Red Book focuses on the emotional vulnerability of its main characters against the background of the physical vulnerability of victims of Bhopal, Animal’s People generates multiple meanings of embodied vulnerability. In Pablo Mukherjee’s reading, Animal “embodies exaggerated human and nonhuman qualities” that position him outside rights discourse. In its place, Mukherjee describes a non-anthropomorphic “politics of transpersonality and collectivity in response to the toxic degradation of a postcolonial environment” (original emphasis): “we begin to hear the drums of an uprising.”67 In contrast, I find a perhaps less radical, more ambivalent politics at work, in that the novel remains deeply engaged in the local and transnational campaigns for justice in the language of rights in Bhopal. In concert with Rob Nixon’s argument, I am concerned about how justice can be pursued through non-anthropomorphic terms, except on the most abstract level, and instead seek to uncover human rights imaginaries that incorporate the multiple scalings of human rights as such.68 Animal’s dehumanization is all too wedded to corporate exploitation rather than to his affiliation with the animal kingdom, although a transpecies analysis can of course magnify the categories through which humans are differentially valued. The potential of humanly embodied vulnerability to shape the political terrain around Bhopal is limited by the tension between its meanings in the text. On one level, Animal’s exceptional embodiment provides a metaphor for what Jasbir Puar theorizes as debility: a characteristic of those “targeted [by neoliberalism] for premature or slow death.” Animal thus figures as one of those “bodies [which] are made to pay ‘for progress,’” in Puar’s words, according to careful calculations of the distributions of risk and probability.69 Along this line of reading, Animal’s debility is an unfortunate though tolerable casualty of India’s embrace of neoliberal development policies, on one hand, and an argument for (perhaps voluntary) continuing liability on the other. From another perspective, as the epigraph of this chapter illustrates, Animal’s street-level view mocks top-down human rights discourse

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Overexposed  139 in a profane, often obscene, and irreverent voice that wards against pity and sympathy. Irony, sarcasm, cursing, and sexist rhetoric constitute a language—polyglot and irreducible to a single nationality—of resistance against the cooptation of Animal’s story. His language also emphasizes that dehumanization (as a product of neoliberalism’s distribution of debility and embodied vulnerability) can take many forms: poverty, “disaster capitalism,” state over citizens’ rights, the spectacularization of suffering, dis-­ ability, and the coalescence of physical and social debility that one might find, for instance, among residents of Bhopal’s Gas Affected Widow’s Colony.70 Moreover, Animal’s language is, at once, idiosyncratic and individualized as well as overtly constructed, drawing attention again and again to politics of any readerly desire for identification. In all of these ways, Animal embodies and articulates a sharp critique of normative human rights claimable in full only by the liberal subject as “a competent social actor capable of playing multiple and concurrent adult (formerly all-male) societal roles: the employee, the employer, the spouse, the parent, the consumer, the manufacturer, the citizen, the taxpayer, and so on.”71 At the same time, the book insists on the importance of keeping embodied suffering and embodied action at the center of rights claims. For instance, the body also figures prominently in the political protests in the novel. The chief local activist, Zafar, leads an effective fast to protest the government’s upcoming meeting with the “Kompani’s” lawyers (including Elli’s ex-husband); however, when the fast ends, the two parties secretly agree to reach a settlement before local organizations get a promised court hearing. Elli, disguised in a burqa, disrupts the meeting by “empt[ying] a bottle of stink bomb juice into the air conditioner” (361), a serious parody of the gas attack that creates a panic in the room and stops the meeting. Animal’s People initially conforms to the fictions of liberal subjectivity within human rights by establishing an opposition between what is irrational, improper, deformed, illegible, and unviable (symbolized by Animal’s khã) and the promise of full personhood that is coded in terms of literacy, rationality, physical and moral uprightness, and an orientation to the future and, equally importantly, is presented as a choice the protagonist must make. Notably in the context of Bhopal and of the novel’s transnational Anglophone readership, those fictions append easily to neoliberal and neocolonial forms of governmentality that can include human rights. According to these logics, rights belong to the rational individual whose embodied and embedded existence, in Grear’s sense of these terms, is incidental to the choices and personal responsibility he properly demonstrates. The end of the novel dismantles this false binary between animality and personhood, the object of either pity or disgust and the subject of rights. First, by ascribing negative personhood to an argumentative khã, as opposed to the silent news photograph, Sinha invokes the greater degree of contextualization in Rai’s later work and initiates a conversation on how fictions of personhood are constructed. Second, when the khã tells Animal, “Bugger off if you can’t

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140 Overexposed stop staring,” it reminds the reader that embodiment matters in relation to imposed precarity rather than in terms of its image alone.72 The turn back to precarity, demanded by a character without life or future, reanimates the negotiation of claims rooted in different temporalities that can open up ways of imagining the future or, stated slightly differently, of negotiating the future anterior.73 Despite these examples, the scripting of embodiment in conventional gendered terms ultimately limits the potential of embodied vulnerability, debility, and precarity to ground an alternative claim to rights from that of the liberal subject. Animal may not be a taxpayer, manufacturer, or employer, but he does yearn for the empowered masculinity of the liberal subject and the hero of the Bildungsroman. On this level, Animal’s physical form marks him as unique, rather than representative, contributes to his objectification and sexualization of women, and drives a narrative subplot concerning his desire for surgery to correct his bent spine. The tension between these two representations of embodied vulnerability is resolved when Animal foregoes Elli’s humanitarian offer of restorative surgery in the United States, choosing instead to “[s]tay four-foot, I’m the one and only Animal.”74 Although this conclusion refuses the humanitarian gesture from afar and the false ideal of the properly embodied liberal subject, it reinforces Animal’s singularity as well as novelistic convention. His singularity is also enhanced by an apparent lack of embeddedness, or a spatial social mobility, that masculinity seems to make possible. Despite his structural disadvantages, his daily existence in the alleys of Khaufpur, in other words, his masculinity grants him access to the homes of elite citizens, to various public spaces, to the derelict factory, and to the medical clinic with a freedom guaranteed by gender privilege. The sense of closure provided by the return to literary realism (ending Animal’s magical realist conversations with his khã), Animal’s acceptance of his physical state, and effective public protests is underscored in classic Bildungsroman tradition by no less than three presumed marriages among central characters at the story’s end. At the same time, the novel clearly does not turn to formal convention to ratify existing human rights norms, as one might expect given Slaughter’s compelling argument about the Bildungsroman and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as mutually enabling fictions.75 Rather the classic Bildungsroman conclusion underscores the limits of universality as envisioned within the UDHR, such that novel and declaration become mutually destabilizing fictions. Neither can meet the expectations of the other in circumstances of such extreme socio-economic disparity and toxic exposure.

Discourses of Toxicity and the Challenge of Cultural Incommensurability in Pterodactyl Although Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha does not directly reference Rai’s photograph, the novella takes up the problem of effective

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Overexposed  141 reportage versus the spectacularization of suffering, particularly across local and national lines, and implicitly posits the work of fiction as an alternative. The journalist Puran returns to the state of Madhya Pradesh to investigate a more recent “unearthly terror” in terms unavoidably linked to the legacy of Bhopal.76 One of Puran’s informants “had made a film about the Bhopal poison gas disaster, opened a health center for the afflicted, and demonstrated against the oppressive tactics of the state government,” providing a context for the figure of the activist-journalist as well as a history of tangled state and corporate interests.77 Distrust of the government and the media is pervasive in the novella’s context. While “the Chief Minister of the state, who built himself a luxurious residence after the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster, is certainly not about to declare Pirtha a ‘famine state,’” the journalist follows a tip from a low-level government bureaucrat to uncover the roots of Pirtha’s crisis.78 Puran mediates between the Adivasis (unscheduled castes or tribals) he is covering and his readership, while Devi (and her translator, Gayatri Spivak) mediate between the Adivasis in the story and a transnational readership. Devi builds the story around the question of Puran’s ability to understand the people and history he covers enough to “make it known that the true tribals in Pirtha are dying of manmade starvation and to explain why this will not be called ­‘famine’  […] and to bring relief quickly to Pirtha.”79 The problem of advocacy, in other words, is one of crafting a shared civic epistemology without doing epistemic violence. This also poses vexing questions of whether Puran’s reporting will benefit the people of Pirtha and how to balance demands for humanitarian assistance and political agency. In place of the controversial images of the Bhopali child’s burial and the spontaneously aborted fetuses, and in contradistinction to media images of the on-going famine within the novella—also figured as inexplicable and attributable to nature rather than to governmentality—Devi offers the mythic cave drawing of the pterodactyl as a locus of identity that cannot be co-opted on behalf of either selfish or humanitarian interests but that nonetheless presages the extinction of the ­Adivasis. Although Puran witnesses both the drawing and its secret burial, and chooses not to report on them, the funereal event suggests that indigenous identities and ways of life perish in the inevitable clashes with the modern state. Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha is even more skeptical than Animal’s People about the possibility of rights’ generalizability across cultural contexts and through the channels of fiction and reportage. This problem is exacerbated by overlapping challenges facing Pirtha: the more immediate crisis is the drought and the locals’ inadvertent poisoning of their own wells in a protest against a well-meaning government official’s crackdown on illegal sales of pesticides (such that toxicity is itself a product of mistranslation between cultures); however, the story also highlights the problem of the very survival of the tribals in the modern nation-state. The villagers whom Puran visits in an attempt to publicize

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the famine do want government relief, yet know well the exploitative power of the media: The clearest truth was told by the tribals of Rawagarhi. Their communal chief spat and sat silent. An elder said, “Go away. A reporter came here two months ago as well. You’ll take our pictures? You’ll write about us? What’s going to happen with that? Will the government give water, land, food? Look at that girl.” A young woman sat looking at the sky. She would have grown comely in a month if she had enough to eat. She sold one of her twins, and the other one died. Want to take her picture?80 The scene captures the tension between exposure and overexposure (the latter always signifying vulnerability), and between figures who are subjects and objects, within human rights discourse. The novella remains ultimately pessimistic about the possibility of crafting a civic epistemology through reportage that can encompass the worldview of the tribals as well as of a diverse readership. What the tribals realize long before Puran is that in order for aid and changes in policy to be effective in both alleviating famine and securing legal personhood, the reporting would need not just to document suffering of another for a potentially humanitarian readership, but to translate between them, to delineate a civic sphere in which the tribals were fully citizen-subjects as opposed to objects of national concern. It raises the difficult question, which Kate Nash poses to Nancy Fraser, of whether “framing itself [can] be made democratic.”81 If democratic framing were possible, the tribals would presumably represent themselves with a civic sphere they help to delineate and within which they would craft their own evidence, though the form and content of that representation might not fit within conventional parameters of the legal person or epistemologies of harm by failing to reflect the professionalized discourses of human rights. The novella insists such translation through reportage cannot take place; however, its work as fiction allows the incommensurables to co-exist and makes them visible to the reader. Unlike news media reports that are produced for immediate consumption, fiction circulates more slowly and across the transnational currents among both its authors and readers; thus, it potentially invokes a wider and temporally flexible civic sphere. The content of that sphere depends largely on the politics and mechanisms of translation. Pterodactyl demands attention to the claims and epistemologies of indigenous peoples, not just in theorizing post-colonial national identity but also in terms of indigenous peoples’ interactions with the combined forces of transnational corporations and state actors. Devi presents this problem in the form of a linguistic crisis: “There are no words in their language to express the daily life of the tribal in today’s India.”82 The normative terms of human rights in

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Overexposed  143 either state or international discursive spheres leave no space for the tribals’ own articulation of their claims: the evidence they would produce in their own language would be illegible to others; meanwhile the dominant human rights discourse fails to address their needs or renders them overexposed and depoliticized. The politics of language as a postcolonial effect with material consequences also emerges through Sinha’s playful use of Marathi, Hindi, Hinglish, French, and Urdu in Animal’s People83 as well as in the visual and verbal tensions between Devi’s Bengali and Spivak’s English evident on the page of the novella. In both cases, the authors emphasize the difficulty of translating rights into different local contexts, not to reassert a rather tired debate between universalism and particularism, but rather to show that the literary evidence and imagination of what is possible depend upon structural and cultural conditions. Particularly in Pterodactyl, linguistic and cultural differences correspond directly to the unequal distribution of rights within the modern nation-state. Regarding how the state sets its priorities, Devi writes, with italicized words in English in the original: No ratio has ever been calculated from the position of people like Bikhia [who is the protector of the image of the pterodactyl]. The position from which computer, information ministry, and media see the situation depends on the will of the current social and state systems. And it is by the will of this system that the educated person is unwilling to think. […] But the first obligation is to calculate the ratio from the position of people like Bikhia. Without that effort Independence has grown to be forty years old.84 Thus, the story documents the ways in which the state’s modernization priorities have excluded the negotiatory participation of India’s non-scheduled groups, and equal protection from its harms for those on the economic and political margins. And indeed, as Devi’s lines assert, there is no movement, no “progress,” without such negotiation. Independence just keeps on being independence, never becoming “post”—as in postcolonial, a time of reorganization and any liberatory potential. A forty-year old independence in this context only signals stagnated oppressions, oppressions delivered under a different name or by a different force, oppressions that people like Bikhia, in Devi’s formulation, are prevented even from naming for others, let alone transcending.

Civic Epistemologies and Toxic Exposure in Pterodactyl and Animal’s People The challenges of translating imposed vulnerability across cultures are compounded by, yet all the more necessary because of, the effects of toxicity, in that toxicity itself exposes the porosity of corporeal and socio-­political boundaries. Lawrence Buell’s foundational model of toxic discourse contributes

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144 Overexposed toward the goal here of a reading of human and environmental justice as inseparable in the contexts of Bhopal, Khaufpur, and Pirtha, one in keeping with the co-development of so-called “third generation” rights in both categories. Within environmental criticism, a third-generation approach stresses the role of economic globalization in environmental processes and advocacy (as opposed to conservationist and moralistic environmentalisms); as an emerging category of human rights, third generation rights include the claims of indigenous peoples and impoverished peoples and for environmental health and intergenerational justice. Embodied, shared vulnerability demonstrates that these two approaches are inevitably implicated in one another. By making manifest these dimensions of vulnerability, critical advocacy in the texts is directed toward continuing liability. Perhaps most significantly, the combination of human and environmental toxicity crystallizes the paradox that, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley write, “ecology does not always work within the frames of human time and political interest,”85 although the discourse of rights remains tied to both. ­Embodied, shared vulnerability provides one means of expanding the chronotopes of political interest. In Buell’s definition, toxic discourse offers a framework for reading transnational environmental concerns (dislodging US-centric environmental criticism) through five main themes: pastoral betrayal, a world without refuge from toxicity, moral arguments against corporate greed, a sense of local self-identification intensified in opposition to outside threats and interests, and an aesthetic that tends toward the gothic.86 Animal’s People and Pterodactyl challenge this framework through their incorporation of human rights, use of hybrid aesthetic registers, and imagination of heterotemporal and spatial scales of toxicity. Buell provides a reading of Devi’s Pterodactyl as “one of the most trenchant and challenging fictions of environmental justice ever written,” yet does so in a chapter dedicated to “Nonanthropocentric Ethics versus Environmental Justice” rather than toxic discourse.87 Within the definition of toxic discourse Buell provides, Pterodactyl addresses the issue of local self-identification; however, that process takes place in relation to both internal and external threats and is represented without nostalgia or romanticization. Animal’s People has been described as both third-­ generation environmental fiction88 and, in Nixon’s fine analysis, the picaresque. Although the novel makes a moral argument in favor of corporate liability and against corporate greed, it avoids being either sanctimonious or gothic in tone and style. To extend Waseem Anwar’s argument regarding Pterodactyl, both texts “map out the bestialities built around multilayered power lines of global capitalism, tracing its effects on the poverty lines of subservient nationalities or groups.”89 Toxicity as a human rights violation makes visible the interconnections between embodied vulnerability, governmentality, neoliberalism, and the environment. Critical advocacy in the context of toxic exposure focuses attention on the terms through which these connections are made, who defines them, and how they circulate.

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Overexposed  145 A cloud of poisonous gas does not differentiate between ostensibly secure legal persons and vulnerable subjects, heed national borders, or conform to a conventional news cycle, but rather than representing it as an unnatural and therefore otherworldly event, Sinha and Devi depict its eventness in overlapping chronotopes. These encompass the de-territorialization and extended temporalization of risk and responsibility within global systems of rights, economic ties, and cultural flows on the one hand, and the rootedness of acute and chronic effects of chemical poisoning on humans and the environment on the other. These different chronotopes develop from how the stories are framed, their circulations, and their various aesthetic registers that range from realist to magical realist to mythological. Such shifting aesthetics challenge a singular, authoritative voice of doom, offering instead more complicated conflicts between worldviews, conflicts that themselves lead to disastrous effects.90 The harm suffered by local populations in the texts from toxic exposure (whether the Bhopal/Khaufpur leak or the poisoned wells of Pirtha) is compounded by the incommensurable worldviews of those with and without institutional power (including the power to wield normative human rights discourses and to produce the evidence they demand). Literary techniques and devices such as the magical realism of the talking khã in Animal’s People or the powerful, mythological presence of the pterodactyl in Devi’s novella may seem irrelevant to the evidentiary claims made through reportage; however, those attributes also enhance the potential of critical advocacy to disclose how authorized versions of events have failed those in need. At the same time, the literary representations of differentiation and incommensurables point to the need for more complex accounting of continuing liability in the construction of intergenerational human rights claims, as opposed to the kind of “homogeneous, empty time” of the present through which news reporting conjures the modern nation.91 Just as the newspaper functions through a shared, national civic epistemology in Benedict Anderson’s model, these fictions circulate within a larger, if more sparsely populated, transnational civic sphere. Magical realism and mythological writing introduce alternative temporalities and subjectivities into that sphere, asking readers to consider the claims of those who would otherwise be relegated to what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as the “­waiting-room” of History-as-political-modernity.92 In Animal’s People, the seduction of otherworldly discourse to describe catastrophe is evident Animal’s characterization of it as the “apokalis.” However the apokalis quickly gains worldy footing when Sinha frames the construction of the modern nation through industrialization with images of a fiery “HELL HOLE” that connects the work of Elli’s father in a P ­ ennsylvania steel mill with Khaufpur’s gas leak. Although Elli’s father proudly declares, “We built Amrika. […] We made the steel for the Walt Whitman Bridge and the World Trade Center,” one of his colleagues informs Elli that her father’s job of checking the steel plates, “glowing red as the devil’s eye” in the furnace

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146 Overexposed pit, was so dangerous that “[o]ne slip, you’re history.”93 That history is, of course, the expendable one upon which a dominant history of the exuberant growth of the United States as global economic power during the early post– World War II era was built, when plans for the bridge and World Trade Center began (they opened in 1957, a decade after India’s independence, and 1973, respectively). Post-war US industrialism is linked metaphorically to Bhopal through apocalyptic language and materially in the distribution of the risks of development among the poor and laboring classes. The period of US economic growth demarcated by Elli’s father’s work also roughly corresponds to the Green Revolution in India, when national policies, developed in partnership with the Ford Foundation during the 1950s, aimed to make India self-sufficient in food production. Although scholars such as Vandana Shiva have written trenchant critiques of how this goal resulted in environmental degradation, the growth of agribusiness at the expense of local farms and farming communities,94 and the rise in political influence of land and business owners at the expense of the poor, Animal’s People highlights how synchronized corporate and state legal interests, both in India and the United States, pass the most disastrous costs of the Green Revolution on to the poor of Khaufpur. These transnational and multigenerational correspondences in the novel also impact its transnational address, especially as the civic epistemology in this example draws from both nations.95 The novel rewrites the “apokalis” to encompass the dangers faced by industrial workers worldwide, the explosion in the chemical plant and its legacy of toxicity, and a fiery local protest against a proposed settlement between the “Kompani” and the local government (with no direct participation by the gas-affected). There is no divine revelation promised in the future. As Animal tells the reader: “All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us.”96 Although Animal’s articulation of solidarity across Baxi’s “geographies of injustice” provides an effective novelistic conclusion, it is less satisfying politically. The slogan of the united poor also masks the structural differences between Animal and Elli’s father in both socio-economic and larger geopolitical terms. The danger also exists in this conclusion and in discourses of toxicity and exposure more generally that the moral outrage and distance from scientific, technical, or legal evidence that inform a fictional text will catalyze “the liability of discourse to become its own sanctuary,” in Buell’s words97 just as literary humanitarian readings may substitute sympathy and mis-­identification from political action. Aside from its conclusion, Animal’s People pays close attention to this danger. Animal directs his story to the conflated subject-position of the “jarrnalis” and the reader as Eyes (referencing at once the ocular damage people suffered during the gas leak, the overexposure of decontextualized suffering, and the reader-as-Subject). This layered address is in keeping with the verbal play and irony Sinha displays throughout the text; however, it also destabilizes the distance between reader and content, always posing the question of how one is reading. The

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Overexposed  147 result is less the kind of identification Nussbaum argues that fiction makes possible—the reader is not likely to “lose herself” reading this novel or Pterodactyl—than a critical awareness of the privileges and losses that form the foundation of any perspective. Sinha makes this difference explicit when Animal sees his neighborhood through Elli’s eyes (the counterpoint, ostensibly, to an outside reader’s perspective through Animal’s eyes). Touring what Animal calls “Paradise Alley, the heart of the Nutcracker, a place I’d known all my life,” Elli exclaims critically, “this whole district looks like it was flung up by an earthquake.” When he hears the word “earthquake,” Paradise Alley becomes: a wreckage of baked earth mounds and piles of planks on which hang gunny sacks, plastic sheets, dried palm leaves. Like drunks with arms round each other’s necks, the houses of the Nutcracker lurch along this lane which, now that I look, isn’t really even a road, just a long gap left by chance between the dwellings. Everywhere’s covered in shit and plastic. Truly I see how poor and disgusting are our lives.98 The novel as a whole legitimates neither Elli’s objectifying view nor the performative power of her speech, but it does demonstrate the difficult process of crafting a shared, if contested, civic epistemology through a willingness to entertain and to examine critically the perspective of an other. Sinha underscores the embodied and environmental contours of that perspective in the multiple meanings of “Animal’s people” that the novel supports. In Pterodactyl, Devi is markedly more pessimistic about the possibility of either a shared epistemology or community of concern regarding the famine of Pirtha, although the story of Puran’s understanding and the meta-context of Spivak’s translation of Devi for an Anglophone readership create fictional and literary civic spheres where Puran’s reportage necessarily fails. Thematically, as Buell and others have noted, Devi shows in painstaking detail disjunctions between the minutiae of the modern state’s bureaucratic workings and the myth-shaped world of the Adivasis that the state administers. The paintings, rituals, maps, and stories of the pterodactyl offer an interruptive, eco-social, alternative to the unilinear march of political modernity (as “the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise,” which also, of course, provides the framework for human rights).99 Those ethical, temporal, and spatial disjunctions between the Adivasis and Puran (and, presumably, the reader) mark differences in how one sees oneself in the world that remain unbridgeable historically and politically, even when neoliberalism trespasses the boundaries between them. The gaps are spatio-temporal and ideological, and they impact the distribution of vulnerability in the form of environmental degradation, access to the fiction of legal personhood and the rights that would attend it, and the eventual destruction of tribal communities whom the state sees as “inaccessible” to its means.100 The position of the Adivasis in the text is secured by ethnic,

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148 Overexposed socio-cultural, economic, and linguistic difference which makes them both illegible to others and unable to represent their own condition: “Do the tribals, whose life is nothing but exploitation, nothing but deprivation, have a synonym for ‘exploitation’ in any of their languages?” Puran asks rhetorically.101 In its formal structure, however, the novella conveys a weak optimism in the possibilities of representation of incommensurable cultural differentiation, if not the differences themselves. This possibility manifests in the novella’s juxtaposition of incompatible discourses within a single narrative frame and character’s perspective. As Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde point out, Devi “articulates this problem [of representing the subaltern] as a ‘moral question’ centered on Puran.”102 Even though Puran recognizes his inevitable failure, Devi describes his discovery in hyperbolically romanticized language tied to Puran’s own, new-found myth of Indian ontology which requires “saving” the tribals. At the same time, Puran’s self-­aggrandizing conclusions need not completely negate the other discourses within the novella. His self-referentiality frames several distinct approaches to uncovering the immediate plight of Pirtha within its larger historical and mythological context: within Puran’s story, the novella details his investigative reporting of bureaucrats and villagers, the history of the “Indian Austric,” educated tribals’ discussion of their own cultural histories, legislative directives, Bikhia’s drawing of the pterodactyl, anthropological research, and Puran’s journalistic report, “Dateline Pirtha.”103 Despite his awareness of the situation and its causes in Pirtha after his visit, Puran can neither adequately convey it to a national readership nor separate the wrongs they suffer from his own desire for a positive national identity seamlessly derived from pre-colonial, colonial, and Independence histories: “If written by a third person, Puran would have got a perspective on the whole thing. There is no one to write.”104 Devi’s ironic statements denote the failure of the journalist to step beyond his own norms, and the impossibility of any unadulterated perspective from which to write, while it also opens a space for the critical work of the novelist, translator, and reader.

Conclusion: Missing Persons Devi never resolves the “problem of translation” of the “incommensurables” of subaltern history into “the problem of capitalist modernity,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words,105 because to do so would collapse the “unverifiable” of fiction into a single interpretation, and diverse truth and legal claims into “single judgments.”106 Such a conclusion, or lack of conclusion, instead holds the multiple chronotopes and civic epistemologies of toxic exposure in productive tension. That tension foregrounds questions concerning the forms redistributive justice might take and for whom, the discursive conditions for effective advocacy, and the possibility of claims grounded in non-normative epistemologies to become legible. These are the kinds of

Overexposed  149

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questions that require continual negotiation among participants to generate the goals and conditions of ongoing advocacy efforts. Fortun writes: The future inhabits the present, yet it also has not yet come—rather like the way toxics inhabit the bodies of those exposed, setting up the future, but not yet manifest as disease, or even as an origin from which a specific and known disease will come. Toxics, like the future anterior, call upon us to think about determinism, but without the straightforward directives of teleology.107 At best, reading the literary fiction in terms of critical advocacy disrupts a universalizing narrative of history that tells and retells the story of the liberal subject and its others. In The Red Book, a Buddhist-inspired, transnational compassion forges family and community out of suffering, although it does so ultimately at the expense of suffering’s particular and political contexts. In contrast, Animal’s People and Pterodactyl, in distinct ways, illuminate how neoliberalism and governmentality produce the structural vulnerabilities of specific populations. Notwithstanding their formal and stylistic differences, all three texts explicitly engage with the question of what it means to expose those vulnerabilities, and the epistemic systems within which they are lived, to diverse audiences. In foregrounding the terms through which the stories above are told— their languages, literary devices, and structures, critical advocacy also raises the question of stories that remain illegible, unimagined, or heretofore untold. The problem of cultural translation in Pterodactyl is one example of productive inconclusivity: Devi offers a sustained analysis of the politics of representation of the Adivasis without resolving it through tropes of cultural authenticity. Among the missing subjects or referents of these three fictions, however, are the Bhopali women for whom toxic exposure has led to political mobility. Instead, when it comes to gender as an analytic of vulnerability and critical advocacy, the literature is constrained by dominant gendered norms. The specific ways in which exposure to and toxicity from the explosion were gendered manifests in the literature through tropes of failed motherhood (e.g., orphans such as Animal and Naga, the aborted fetus of Animal’s khã, and the mother who sold one child and saw another die in Pterodactyl). The prevalence of this trope supports Dianne Otto’s argument that international human rights law tends to produce three female subjectivities: the wife and mother, equal person, or victim.108 And the depiction of maternal failure illustrates how easily the first and third of Otto’s subjectivities are conflated. In response and to conclude, I turn to the recent research undertaken through oral ethnographies of women activists of Bhopal. This scholarship does not posit oral interviews as transparent representations of authentic subjects, and is not meant to privilege testimony above all other discourses. However, it does point to the need to be mindful of the ways in which gendered

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150 Overexposed norms operate across genres to collapse the categories of women and victims. When that happens, the productive capacity of vulnerability theory to activate new norms of legal personhood is circumscribed and the inherent masculinization of liberal subjectivity re-emerges. In its place, the recent research tracks the development of counter-epistemologies rooted in embodied vulnerability as a source of political mobility and theory. Recognizing the less than 20 percent female literacy rate in Bhopal as well as the gendered norms that reduced the socio-political visibility of women at the time of the disaster, Suroopa Mukherjee, Eurig Scandrett, Tarunima Sen, and Dharmesh Shah conducted oral interviews with contemporary Bhopal activists in their domestic spaces. Earlier celebrations of female activists such as Rashida Bee and ­Chandra Devi Shukla, winners of the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize for their advocacy work, were notable for their narratives of gendered exceptionality. That rhetoric, combined with the international exposure the two women garnered, also generated controversy among local movements that remain wary of international cooptation of what for them are resolutely local concerns. Mukherjee et al’s research, by contrast, focuses on the how Bhopali women’s “engagement in the struggle for justice has been a vehicle for developing analytical skills cultivated through oratory, oral debate and physical embodiment.”109 These developments stem from the articulation of gender within a wide range of tactics and organizational units, including hunger strikes, union organizing, public protests, and neighborhood groups: We found a number of potential themes, but running through them as a central motif was the role played by women’s activism in “scripting” the fight for justice in Bhopal. In a sense gender was the nodal issue. The very nature of women’s exclusion and dispossession in the context of an industrial disaster made them twice victimized. Already marginalized in a patriarchal society, the disaster killed and maimed male earning members of the family, thus making women dependent on state-sponsored welfare schemes that were not gender sensitive. Women are conspicuously absent from official documents, both legal and medical that were used for classification of injuries for determining the quantum of compensation to be paid as part of the settlement, and the research to be done by the Indian Council of Medical Research for medical rehabilitation of the victims. […] In an important sense women have carved out their relevant position within the movement by reinstating gender as an important component of the discursive practice of the social movement.110 This brief citation underscores the necessity of gendered readings of embodied vulnerability, in conjunction with political mobilization, in crafting civic epistemologies of Bhopal for the future. Without close attention to gender, in its local articulations, as an analytic, the vulnerable subject too easily replicates the gendered divisions upon which liberal subjectivity is based.

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Overexposed  151 When that occurs, representations of vulnerable subjects become generalizable through gendered norms as opposed to political affiliation. The epistemologies of the Adivasis in Devi’s novella and the Bhopali women cited in the studies above also point to the difficulty in forging generalizability across different civic spheres. The difficulty is in part attributable to the challenge of cultural translation, as discussed above, but also to the ways in which the epistemologies that ground these diverse subjects are themselves contingent and changing, developing through and against participation in human rights struggles.

Notes

1. Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” 679–92. 2. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.” 3. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, 234. 4. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity, 48. 5. Baxi, “Geographies of Injustice: Human Rights at the Altar of Convenience,” 197–212. 6. Stanton, “Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Horizontally: Resignifying the Universal in Human Rights Discourse,” 77. 7. Baxi, “Writing About Impunity and Environment: The ‘Silver Jubilee’ of the Bhopal Catastrophe,” 44. 8. I borrow the term from Naomi Klein. See also Moore, “‘Disaster Capitalism’ and Human Rights: Embodiment and Subalternity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” I use catastrophe and disaster interchangeably in this chapter, although from disaster- or catastrophe-management perspectives the terms trigger different responses. 9. Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” 692. 10. “Q&A with Indra Sinha, author of the Booker shortlisted ‘Animal’s People,’” By Sandhya, Sepia Mutiny (blog), 13 March 2008. http://www.sepiamutiny. com/sepia/archives/005088.html. 11. Sathyu Sarangi, http://www.indrasinha.com/animal.html. 12. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 314. For another strong argument against literary humanitarianism, Jennifer Rickel argues that Animal’s People disabuses the reader of this tendency and issues a posthumanist critique of human rights (“‘The Poor Remain’: A Posthumanist Rethinking of Literary Humanitarianism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People”). Although I agree with the critique of literary humanitarianism, its extension to human rights as a field of justice fails to offer an alternative. 13. Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form, 4. 14. Baxi uses this term to avoid the language of victimhood in “Writing About Impunity and Environment,” 24. 15. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity and Environment,” 43, 44. 16. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity and Environment,” 29. 17. For the full text of the decision as well as Baxi’s critical introduction, see Upendra Baxi and the Indian Law Institute, Inconvenient Forum and Convenient Catastrophe: The Bhopal Case.

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152 Overexposed 18. Baxi, Inconvenient Forum and Convenient Catastrophe, 4, 10. 19. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity and Environment,” 33–34. 20. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57. 21. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders, 352. 22. Fletcher, Ono, and Roy, “Justice for Bhopal,” 10. 23. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, 172. 24. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma: Human Rights and Discursive Ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act,” 94. Dale provides an excellent analysis of the particularities of the case as well as its broader implications in this essay. 25. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma,” 294. 26. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma,” 293. 27. Dale notes that identifying these norms “can be controversial,” and he cites the Vienna Convention of the Law on Treaties (1969), quoted above, for their prevailing authority. Dale also cites a 1987 US statute that lists “the following jus cogens norms: genocide; slavery or slave trade; summary execution or causing the disappearance of individuals; torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; prolonged arbitrary detention; systematic racial discrimination; and a consistent pattern or gross violation of internationally recognized human rights” (Dale, 301n12). 28. Dale, “Transnational Legal Conflict Between Peasants and Corporations in Burma,” 303. 29. “The Shell game ends,” The Economist, 20 April 2013: 34. 30. Center for Constitutional Rights, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, http:// ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/kiobel. 31. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 3. 32. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 2. 33. Mukherjee, “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us’: Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal’s People,” 218. 34. I am not aware of a comparable study of reporting of the disaster within India, though many sources note local journalist Rajkumar Keswani’s four articles for the Hindi-language Rapat Weekly in 1982, two years before the explosion, that reported on leaks and safety lapses and warned of an impending disaster at the plant. The literary non-fiction account of the gas leak, Lapierre and Moro’s Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster (2002) pays special attention to Keswani’s work in Chapter 26. 35. Wilkins, Shared Vulnerability: The Media and American Perceptions of the Bhopal Disaster, xii, 51. 36. Wilkins, Shared Vulnerability, 111. 37. Sokhi-Bulley, “Government(ality) by Experts: Human Rights as Governance,” 252. 38. Wilkins, Shared Vulnerability, 114–15. 39. Chouliaraki, “Post-humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication Beyond the Politics of Pity,” 109.

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Overexposed  153 40. Godden, “‘We have no right to walk into another’s suffering’—Raghu Rai on Bhopal, the demise of ‘Truth,’ and the future of the photojournalistic aesthetic in campaigning.” 41. Larabee, Decade of Disaster, 120. 42. Larabee, Decade of Disaster, 120. 43. “Bhopal Medical Appeal,” The Guardian (London), 3 December 1994: 10–11. 44. Chouliaraki, “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication beyond a Politics of Pity,” 108. 45. Rob Nixon describes how this blurring of genres extends to media in the website Sinha, founded to extend the fictional world of the book into the public sphere: “Sinha’s 2007 fiction can be read as an experiment in linking the protest novel to digitally networked dissent. Indeed, the public life of Animal’s People as a novel has been powerfully shaped by Sinha’s mobile, multimedia approach: on his blog and Web site, for example, he mixes non-fictional testimony from Bhopal survivors with a sardonic visual-and-verbal fantasia of a poisoned city trying to rebrand itself as a tourist paradise” (Nixon 2011, 43–44). 46. From Henry Campbell Black, Law Dictionary (1990), quoted in Laqueur, “The Dead Body and Human Rights,” 75, 76. 47. Laqueur, “The Dead Body and Human Rights,” 77, 79. 48. For a broader overview of the shared history of human rights and literature, see Peters, “‘Literature,’ the ‘Rights of Man,’ and Narratives of Atrocity: Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony”; and, for an incisive look at the mutual imbrications of the Bildungsroman and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from a postcolonial perspective, see Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. 49. Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, 56. 50. Laqueur, “The Dead Body and Human Rights,” 81. 51. Higgins and Leps, “The Politics of Life after Death: Ondaatje’s Ghost,” 201. 52. Jasanoff, “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance,” 688. 53. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses this phrase repeatedly to denote fiction’s distinct characteristic from which we may learn and to argue for readings that resist closure. See, for example, Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 174–75 and 242–3n70; “Terror: A Speech After 9/11,” 109; and “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” 23. In “Ethics and Politics,” she argues, “Literary reading teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. It is not that literary reading does not generalize. It is just that those generalizations are not on evidentiary ground” (23). Because fiction asks the reader to imagine what is possible and, in the terms of a given text, probable, it lends itself to the work of advocacy in Fortun’s definition. Both Fortun’s concept of advocacy and Spivak’s concept of the power of literary readings resist the temptation to seek closure, advocating instead one’s continual reassessment of the terms of engagement with his/her civic spheres. 54. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 5, 12. 55. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 46. 56. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 350, 352–53. 57. Delahunt, The Red Book, 4. 58. Delahunt, The Red Book, 291. 59. Delahunt, The Red Book, 290, 283.

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154 Overexposed 60. Delahunt, The Red Book, 14, 144. 61. Slaughter, “Humanitarian Reading,” 94. 62. Slaughter, “Humanitarian Reading,” 102, 106. 63. Interestingly, in light of its exploration of Buddhism’s capacity to alleviate suffering across identitarian lines, the novel does not include the potential role of engaged Buddhism as a movement dedicated to social activism. 64. Delahunt, The Red Book, 132. 65. Sinha, Animal’s People, 4. 66. Rai,http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage& VBID=2K1HZS2W7TVK&IT=ZoomImage01_VForm&IID=2TYRYDZA869L&PN=12&CT=Search. 67. Mukherjee, “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us,’” 227, 228, 230. 68. Nixon, “Slow Violence Revisited: A Response to Mary Louise Pratt and Stephanie LeMenager,” 305–7. 69. Puar, “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better,” 153. 70. Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal disaster 20 Years on, 69. 71. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 17. 72. Sinha, Animal’s People, 58. 73. Fortun, Advocacy After Bhopal, 354. 74. Sinha, Animal’s People, 366. 75. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. 76. Devi, Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha, 101. 77. Devi, Pterodactyl, 109. 78. Devi, Pterodactyl, 98. 79. Devi, Pterodactyl, 189. 80. Devi, Pterodactyl, 191. 81. Fraser, Scales of Justice, 153. 82. Devi, Pterodactyl, 118. 83. For a reverential overview of Sinha’s linguistic inventiveness, see Sharma’s “Britain’s Hegemony India’s May Be: Indra Sinha: Identity through language in Animal’s People.” 84. Devi, Pterodactyl, 161–62. 85. DeLoughrey and Handley, “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” 4. 86. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond, 35–43. 87. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 230. 88. Mahlstedt, Review of Animal’s People, 663. 89. Anwar, “Transcribing Resistance: Cartographies of Struggling Bodies and Minds in Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps,” 85. 90. Rob Nixon’s analysis of Animal’s People in terms of the picaresque and Andrew Carrigan’s reading of the novel within the genre of crime fiction lead to similar conclusions. See Carrigan, “‘Justice is on our side? Animal’s People, generic hybridity, and eco-crime,” 159–74. 91. Benedict Anderson’s well-known description of the modern nation as an imagined community is argued in part through the role of newspapers in creating the narratives to fill the perpetual present of “homogenous, empty

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Overexposed  155 time”—providing the stories that define the horizontal, progression of days for a common group of (national) readers (Anderson, Imagined Communities). 92. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 9. 93. Sinha, Animal’s People, 201. 94. See, for example, Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. 95. Carrigan argues similarly that the novel speaks less for local (Nixon) or transpersonal (Mukherjee) politics than it “functions more as a crisis for its readers in respect to the criminal perpetuation of environmental violence” (“‘Justice is on Our Side?’” 168). 96. Devi, Animal’s People, 366. 97. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 50. 98. Sinha, Animal’s People, 106. 99. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. 100. Devi, Pterodactyl, 110. 101. Devi, Pterodactyl, 118. 102. Pickering and Kehde, “Reading de Certeau through Devi—and Vice Versa,” 346. 103. Devi, Pterodactyl, 186. 104. Devi, Pterodactyl, 159. 105. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17. 106. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 350. 107. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 354. 108. Otto, “Lost in Translation: Rescripting the Sexed Subjects of International Human Rights Law,” 318–56. 109. Mukherjee et al., “Generating Theory in the Bhopal Survivors’ Movement,” 151. 110. Mukherjee et al., “Generating Theory in the Bhopal Survivors’ Movement,” 165. See also Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster.

4 Re-purposing Témoignage

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Humanitarian Spaces and Subjects in Photo/Graphic Narratives of Médecins Sans Frontières

And ours is not a contented action. Bringing medical aid to people in distress is an attempt to defend them against what is aggressive to them as human beings. Humanitarian action is more than simple generosity, simple charity. It aims to build spaces of normalcy in the midst of what is abnormal. More than offering material assistance, we aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings … Humanitarianism occurs where the political has failed or is in crisis. James Orbinski, Nobel Prize Speech on behalf of MSF

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, one of the best known and largest humanitarian medical aid organizations in the world (hereafter, MSF), it praised the MSF’s adherence “to the fundamental principle that all disaster victims […] have a right to professional assistance, given as quickly and efficiently as possible.” And the Committee pointed to MSF’s commitment to “pointing to the causes of such catastrophes” in order to “form bodies of public opinion opposed to violations and abuses of power” as further evidence of the organization’s valuable work. The announcement concluded: “each fearless and self-sacrificing helper shows each victim a human face, stands for respect for that person’s dignity, and is a source of hope for peace and reconciliation.”1 Together these statements capture many of the complexities of humanitarianism as at once necessary and compromised: the combinatory rhetorics of professionalism and self-sacrifice, the slide in and out of theological and secular ethics, the pull between universalized and contextualized frames, and the blurred line between humanitarianism and juridico-political human rights discourses. This chapter examines photo/graphic narratives of MSF2 missions conducted from 1984 to 2005, in the context of the organization’s evolving ethos, in order to investigate the fraught nexus of human rights and humanitarianism. I look specifically at how humanitarianism is framed through MSF visual narratives in relation to vulnerable and political subjects. Whereas the human rights that confirm legal personhood and the humanitarianism that provides conditions necessary to sustain bare life ostensibly belong

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Re-purposing Témoignage  157 in separate realms, both the organization’s operations and its self-critical praxis reflect the impossibility of maintaining that theoretical separation. In addition, human rights and humanitarianism are jointly embedded in transnational networks that often promote—to take the name of USAID’s most recent women’s empowerment initiative in Afghanistan—vulnerable subjects’ integration into neoliberal and securitizing forms of governmentality. MSF’s combination of self-critique and commitment to témoignage as a form of witnessing and to the concept of humanitarian spaces in which to work undergird my analysis of how representations of suffering are used to mobilize humanitarian appeals and what happens when those representations are re-purposed through other cultural products. Humanitarianism’s intervention on behalf of bare life calls forth Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of it as the product and pre-occupation of sovereignty: “It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (original emphasis).3 As is well known, according to Agamben, sovereignty’s production of bare life finds its expression in the figure of homo sacer and the state of exception in which sovereignty demonstrates its power to suspend law upon which it is founded and to kill with impunity and without the ritual of sacrifice. Agamben reads that founding moment of the modern state in relation to discourses of human rights that perform the “inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state,” such that bare life “becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty” as well as the object of its rule, thereafter divided by citizenship and its exclusions.4 Accordingly, the Nazi camp, then the refugee camp, and (in Judith Butler’s analysis in Precarious Life) Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay become paradigmatic political spaces, where sovereignty over bare life is exercised in a state of exception. For Agamben, humanitarian organizations—which today are more and more supported by international commissions—can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. […] A humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp—which is to say, the pure space of exception—is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master.5 The refugee—a figure who will reappear in this chapter in Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of the 1985 famine in the Sahel—serves in Agamben’s theory as the “limit concept that radically calls into question the fundamental categories of the nation-state” and signals the separation of bare life from the rights-protected existence of the citizen.6 Although Agamben’s conceptualization of bare life is helpful in thinking through MSF’s work at sustaining human life in the midst of political

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158 Re-purposing Témoignage failure, violence, or negligence, I contend that the idea of “a humanitarianism separated from politics” is both theoretically and materially impossible. Not only are humanitarian organizations structurally embedded in the contexts they address and from which they hail, but as I have argued throughout this project, the recipients of humanitarian assistance are themselves always already juridico-political subjects, even if they are constructed in negative relation to the law. As the analyses of MSF will demonstrate, when a transnational medical humanitarian organization negotiates the political spheres from which it emerges and within which it works, and negotiates with its partnered organizations and the people whom they serve, the results are heterogeneous. Transnational NGOs inevitably operate in a complex force fields defined by NGOs’ accountability to their funders, professional expertise, operational capacity, governing ideologies and ethos, local political conditions, and, not insignificantly, the needs, priorities, and desires of their subjects. To make this argument regarding heterogeneity and the socio-political subjects of humanitarian assistance, I draw on Angela Naimou’s and the Comaroffs’ insights into the limitations of Agamben’s formulation of contemporary biopolitics as well as MSF’s own articulation of its mission. For Naimou, the weakness in Agamben’s bifurcation of refugee and citizen, both of which signal sovereign power, is its restrictive logic in reading the forms of legal subjects produced by juridico-political governmentality. In her analysis of how the concept of the threshold of bare life functions to delimit Agamben’s argument, she demonstrates how bare life as an absolutely minimal biological human existence precludes consideration of the many different forms of subjectivity that biopolitics generates. She points out, “What lies between the ideal citizen and bare life is an enormous range of particular legal identities.”7 With regard to the refugee camp, for instance, Agamben’s theory would yield only those cast out from freedoms and protections of citizenship who are on the brink of survival, as opposed to a dense social fabric in which heterogeneous conditions of physical viability are triaged, to be sure, but also gain meaning within and against the ways people already understand themselves. Agamben’s theoretical rendering of the camp is tied to the logic of national sovereignty in ways that also restrict its theoretical efficacy. As noted in the citation above, he describes the international framework within which humanitarianism, such as that performed by MSF, functions; however, his conclusion suggests that the international commissions he envisions reflect national sovereign aims. By understanding humanitarianism as a product and agent of multiple geopolitical formations, rather than solely the nation-state, it becomes clearer how humanitarianism can represent and serve diverse interests, beyond those of national sovereignty, even if the ability of a transnational organization to reach across existing political borders into private lives deserves the utmost scrutiny. Indeed, humanitarian organizations such as MSF gain stature by their willingness to confront abuses

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Re-purposing Témoignage  159 of state power, as the Nobel Committee commented. In another example, in their recent reading of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa, the Comaroffs argue that Agamben’s core concepts of the state of exception, the threshold of bare life, and the paradigmatic space of the camp cannot apply universally to capture the dynamics of political modernity. Taking the case of the shifting political articulations of AIDS activism, they demonstrate that to apply his model indiscriminately is to “blu[r] precisely what demands to be specified” in terms of how political subjectivity is defined and mobilized. Moreover, they continue, “While the will to power, or the effect of structural violence, might significantly sever life from civic protection and social value, no act of sovereignty, except perhaps in fantasy, can actually alienate human beings entirely from entailment in webs of relations, meanings, and affect.”8 As discussed later in this chapter, MSF’s internal negotiations over its mission priorities, the responsibilities of witnessing, level of autonomy in the field, and medical criteria for triage indicate that every aspect of its work, from structure and staffing to witnessing to epidemiological research, is always already bound up with biopolitical (which includes biocapital—“the knowledge, patents, commodities, and systems of transaction that make the difference between life and death”—and biosecuritization logics9) and geopolitical networks of governmentality, capital, and securitization. Whereas normative human rights are inherent and grounded in the reason and dignity of the liberal subject, humanitarianism—figured as either a willing gesture or an obligation—is motivated by empathy for a recognizable, temporary need. In their introduction to Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown stress the different historical paths of human rights and humanitarianism. Humanitarianism has its roots in eighteenth century discourses of literature, philosophy, and politics, and it is an ethos shaped by the narrative forms that express it.10 It has figured at different historical moments as the pre-eminent, secular discourse of compassion on the one hand, and as “a language often perceived as laden with outmoded notions of charity, protection, sentiment, and neocolonial paternalism,” on the other.11 Thomas Laqueur notes, for instance, that when Charles Dickens was crafting Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, humanitarianism “was almost exclusively a term of contempt describing the moral perversion of caring more for those at a distance than for those near.”12 The Oxford English Dictionary ­confirms that humanitarianism was “chiefly depreciative in early use, with the implication of excessive sentimentality towards criminals and the poor,” whereas now it references “concern for human welfare as a primary or pre-­ eminent moral good” (OED, original emphasis). The shift in the moral coding of the humanitarian suggests an analogous shift in that of the recipient: from “criminals and the poor,” for whom concern is ostensibly misplaced, to innocent victims as paradigmatic vulnerable subjects who deserve assistance. Humanitarianism in its current meaning seems to confirm the positive morality of both the giver and receiver; however, that affirmation depends

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160 Re-purposing Témoignage upon the construction of undeserved, imposed, and innocent vulnerability at the core of the humanitarian exchange. Well-established critiques of transnational humanitarianism examine the ways in which it often depends upon images of vulnerability-asvictimhood, reconfirms the structural advantage of the bestower of aid over the recipient, flows from the Global North to the Global South, and is motivated by a paternalistic, objectifying, colonizing gaze upon distant suffering in conjunction with quasi-universalizing, emotion-laden appeals. To these critiques may be added Agamben’s capacious warning, cited above, that humanitarianism serves the interests of political sovereignty. The growth of militarized humanitarian interventions in the name security of persons and other human rights only underscores how humanitarianism can provide an alibi for or be complicit with violence and the distribution of precarity. It is when humanitarianism masks its political imbrications, in other words, that it most readily functions as a paternalistic and colonizing biopolitical formation upon vulnerable subject-victims. This raises the core question of the current chapter of how vulnerability travels across spaces, times, and discourses: what happens to the ethico-aesthetic effects of images of vulnerability and humanitarian assistance, once the images are separated from the humanitarian appeals they aimed to support? As discussed in the previous chapter with regard to Indra Sinha’s work on the Bhopal Medical Appeal and then as a novelist, the effects of techniques employed to represent distant suffering depend on their generic and civic contexts. This chapter then considers how MSF’s ethos shapes representations of vulnerability in its projects, particularly whether its representations necessarily depend upon the rightslessness and ostensibly universal appeal of vulnerable subjects. I orient this discussion in photographic and graphic narratives of missions conducted by MSF, looking for the ways in which the visual narratives construe the responsibility of their readers toward what they see, as well as of MSF’s missions toward those whom they serve. And I examine the inherent tension between responsibility, advocacy, and witnessing on the one hand, and constructions of their subjects’ physical viability, individuated vitability or expressive animation, and socio-political co-flourishing on the other. The books under consideration use different combinations of visual and verbal narrative to document specific historical moments within MSF missions, although each of these products is removed temporally and in terms of its implied address from the projects upon which they are founded: Sebastião Salgado’s Sahel: The End of the Road features the photographer’s arresting images and minimal text regarding the 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia and surrounding areas; Guibert et al.’s The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders combines photography of a 1986 project to provide healthcare to Afghans living in remote regions during the Soviet invasion with a more contemporary, hand-drawn graphic narrative that parallels and reflects the photographic narrative; the

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Re-purposing Témoignage  161 2005 portfolios of five photographers’ images of multiple MSF projects in Haviv et al.’s Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles, a graphic narrative of the author’s 2005 life in Burma. The four books vary in the strength of their ties to MSF. The first three come out of partnerships between photographers and MSF to document the organization’s efforts. The photographers published select photographs from the missions in the news media at the time and MSF has used photographs in its own fundraising appeals and reports; however, the books are later, more extensive projects that stand on their own. The last text, Delisle’s Burma Chronicles, emerges from the author’s year in Burma while his wife served there as an administrator for MSF-France. On the broadest level, these visual and verbal narratives frame an other’s suffering or death as “a claim to be regarded, to be noticed, to be seen as someone to whom the living have ethical obligations,”13 although they often do so by foregrounding their own representational strategies as well as the perspectives of MSF staff. At least in the first three books, the implicit ethical obligation of the images goes beyond witnessing as spectatorship alone and toward some form of action: the photographers were contracted to generate an appeal on behalf of MSF’s work. However that obligation also carries with it marks of privilege, which include the sense that the action of the humanitarian on the ground or the photographer as proxy for the reader might eclipse the social meaning and political potential of the humanitarian subject. Rather than critique humanitarianism’s inevitable failure to stand apart from politics, this chapter considers the argument made by Didier Fassin, anthropologist, physician, and former vice-president of MSF, that humanitarianism at its most effective might “reformulat[e] what is at stake in politics.”14

Témoignage MSF emerged in 1971 out of its founders’ (both doctors and journalists) medical aid work on behalf of those caught in the Nigerian civil war and a major flood in what is now Bangladesh. A legacy of its founders, MSF’s distinguishing feature is its dual commitment to provide medical care “to people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe, primarily due to armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, exclusion from health care, or natural disasters,” according to MSF’s “Mission Statement,” and to perform témoignage: a blend of witnessing and/as advocacy on behalf of egregious human suffering in the areas where MSF staff are working. Although Peter Redfield’s exemplary analysis of MSF’s ethos and practice stresses its gradual adoption of témoignage, former president Dr. James Orbinski emphasizes that “MSF was born out of an understanding of the role humanitarians could play in shaping public opinion. It insisted on the responsibility not just to act but to speak out in solidarity against violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”15 That combination of

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162 Re-purposing Témoignage medical care, witnessing, and advocacy raises an implicit question about the relationship between the kinds of agency (and accompanying responsibility) engendered by its different roles. Although MSF explicitly defines itself as a civil, as opposed to a political, organization, it must nevertheless negotiate the political contexts framing its missions, particularly in “push[ing] the political to assume its inescapable responsibility,”16 in Orbinski’s words. The organization frames its own responsibility in the face of suffering as medical and moral—scientific and logistical on the one hand and overtly rhetorical on the other—both animated by the deep structure of crisis to which responsibility responds. Delineated according to both a “‘minimalist’ biopolitics,” defined by Redfield as “the temporary administration of survival within wider circumstances that do not favor it,” and “the deeper humanitarian goal of reestablishing human dignity,”17 crisis determines the targeted scope of medical relief, the moral claim of the witness, and whether that claim is directed toward political actors, aggressors, potential donors, or some broader citizenry. It also raises the central question of how crisis and need are defined by humanitarian subjects—those people who receive humanitarian treatment or assistance and are thereby incorporated into humanitarianism’s biopolitical operations. Redfield emphasizes that a minimalist biopolitics does not lead to human dignity “other than [through] publicly demonstrating an attachment to that ideal at the moment of its abnegation.”18 Eyal Weizman’s recent analysis of MSF among other case studies that illuminate the structural violence of humanitarianism goes further, arguing that minimalist biopolitics can provide base standards for sustaining life (calculating, for example, the minimum number of calories, fresh water, and electricity necessary to keep alive a given population) as readily for humanitarian purposes as for “exercising contemporary violence and for governing the displaced, the enemy and the unwanted.”19 Recognizing the paradox that minimalist biopolitics can be used to sustain or to destroy life, MSFs material, epistemic, moral, and rhetorical spheres of action overlap to posit physical viability and human dignity as combinatory aims of humanitarian responsibility. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on behalf of MSF in 1999, which provides the epigraph to this chapter, Orbinski defines humanitarianism in universalizing terms of moral concern based on presumably shared and self-evident values of crisis, normalcy, dignity, rights, suffering, and action: “Humanitarian action […] aims to build spaces of normalcy in the midst of what is abnormal. More than offering material assistance, we aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings.”20 This rhetoric posits a common humanity predicated on shared values that transcend structural imbalances and cultural difference. It mobilizes the liberal norms of individual rights and autonomy in ostensibly universalized language of what it should mean to be a human being; and the universalizing language of Western liberalism implies interruption by local (non-­ Western) forces. At the same time, the story of what constitutes a crisis,

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against that universalized state of normalcy, depends upon the temporality that frames it. For a doctor, [a] patient improves, expires, or enters a chronic state. But for a historian, every age has its turning points and critical decisions amid turmoil. This sense of crisis stems less from the particularities of suffering per se, than the repeated discovery of moments of truth within them and the ordering of that truth into a revelatory narrative. Thus, the problem before us is not crisis per se but the very codification of crisis into a state, a condition of action, and the subsequent limiting of emergency to within these borders.21 These questions of the temporal spheres of MSF’s priorities and projects have been debated within the organization more forcefully as it has expanded its mission scope from short term crises to include the longue durée of chronic public health needs, including psychological issues, often linked to structural failures. These different mission scopes are reflected in the photo/graphic narratives under consideration here, from Salgado’s photographs of the 1984–85 famine in the Sahel to Delisle’s treatment of the lack of public medical care for Burmese minorities as one feature of their structural precaritization by the state. In his address, Orbinski turns to the discourse of rights and dignity to bridge temporal and spatial disjunctions between crisis and history, emergency and normalcy. Témoignage, in this sense, helps to define the chronotope of crisis. This linkage potentially situates an immediate catastrophe or need in the longue durée of its political and economic structural roots and, paradoxically, enables the effacement of those roots by the immediate demands of acute medical necessity. On an organizational level, témoignage provides the bridge between these two temporalities and contexts. According to one MSF-UK newsletter, témoignage is “simply the act of being willing to speak out about what we see happening in front of us. In MSF, this means willingness to speak on behalf of the people we assist: to bring abuses and intolerable situations to the public eye.”22 This awkward formulation, “the act of being willing,” captures some of the ambiguity inherent in its praxis: Is it a moral imperative, inherent capacity (by virtue of being a member of the organization), or political choice? Does it presume that those suffering are unable or unwilling to represent themselves? As stated on the parent website, MSF’s foundational principles include the injunction to bear witness: The principle of impartiality and neutrality are not synonymous with silence. When MSF witnesses extreme acts of violence against individuals or groups, the organisation may speak out publicly. We may seek to bring attention to extreme need and unacceptable suffering: when access to lifesaving medical care is hindered, when medical facilities

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come under threat, when crises are neglected, or when the provision of aid is inadequate or abused.23 Note how the rhetoric focuses on the medical dimensions of atrocity as the statement moves from the more general statement against “unacceptable suffering” to particularities of MSF’s efforts to provide care, reinforcing the connection of témoignage to medical assistance. However, the website reiterates its commitment to témoignage in a descriptive passage that focuses less on the immediate delivery of medical care than on the political dimensions of crisis: “MSF may speak out publicly in an effort to bring a forgotten crisis to public attention, to alert the public to abuses occurring beyond the headlines, to criticize the inadequacies of the aid system, or to challenge the diversion of humanitarian aid for political interests.”24 This statement is followed by a list of high profile denouncements of state and corporate behavior from 1985 to the present. Implicit within the practice of témoignage, then, is both the capacity and opportunity (“MSF may speak out”) of MSF staff to publicize injustice from multiple subject positions, as medical experts and outraged witnesses, as well as the belief that listeners—potential donors, sympathetic or shamed political actors, other professional organizations in the field—ought to heed and respond to their efforts. In effect, MSF defines one (optional for staff) facet of its responsibility as reminding others of theirs. Témoignage is crucial to MSF’s ethos of “operational neutrality,”25 an approach that distinguishes the organization from the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) position of silent diplomacy and political neutrality. MSF highlights its ethos of autonomy, in that the organization may suspend missions whose direct or indirect beneficiaries include belligerent political actors (as Delisle documents with regard to one of the Burma projects) and to speak out about the perpetrators of human rights abuses, even at the risk of curtailing the medical assistance MSF may provide as a result; too, MSF skillfully employs visual media to assist in publicizing its denunciations and its own projects. In this sense, témoignage is crucial to the organization’s work as a non-state actor: its fundraising appeals, animated by témoignage, generate its operating budget predominantly through the contributions of private donors. Although private funding necessitates accountability to those donors, and reflects differences in wealth among various MSF chapters and, thus, differences in capacity, it releases the organization from overt state oversight. Complicating and compromising this political flexibility is its development within the larger context of the expanding, neoliberal privatization of what were formerly state services, including medical care.26 Redfield analyzes MSF’s evolving ethos of témoignage and the challenges it presents to the principles of organizational neutrality. Whereas then MSF Executive Director Rony Brauman insisted in the early 1990s that témoignage should be used “only when [MSF] is the sole witness of an exaction

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Re-purposing Témoignage  165 or when its testimony is the last recourse,”27 it has since figured more prominently in MSF’s self-definition. A key moment in this evolution came during the genocide in Rwanda, when the failure of the international community to respond in 1994 precipitated a significant shift in favor of forceful condemnation of both the genocide and the international non-response, and MSF publicly supported arguments for military intervention. The next year, the organization made a fuller articulation of its commitment to témoignage.28 Since then, however, MSF has actively condemned military humanitarian missions, including the terms formulated as Responsibility to Protect (R2P) by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 that include, in part, the support of military action as the last resort “against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state.”29 These policy shifts reflect ongoing debates within MSF about its geopolitical and biopolitical roles. In keeping with its position of separating military interventions from other forms of response, in a statement from its 1995 meeting, MSF defined témoignage to refer to: the presence of volunteers among populations in danger, motivated by concern for the fate of fellow human beings and a willingness to be at their side and listen to them, as well as to carry out medical work among them; and the duty to report on the situation and the fate of these people. Where MSF is present as a witness to massive and repeated violations of human rights and/or humanitarian law (such as forced population displacements, refoulement [forced return], genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes), then MSF may ultimately be forced to make public denunciations.30 This articulation of témoignage changes the configuration of the witnesses, now beside and listening to their humanitarian subjects instead of speaking for them. According to this stronger statement, perspective is grounded, and “willingness” combines with “motivation” to produce a “duty” to speak out, such that it becomes a responsibility rather than merely a capacity to be a witness. Responsibility stems from a sense of justice and moral compulsion that the MSF worker and patient share, as well as the recognition that causes of and solutions to humanitarian crises belong to the political realm. Engagement with that realm takes many forms. MSF-Belgium’s “Témoignage Toolbox,” for example, suggests “silent diplomacy, letter writing, media events, overt diplomacy, press communiqués, and public statements of position papers”31 to publicize suffering, condemn perpetrators, and advocate for greater assistance on behalf of vulnerable and suffering subjects. At the same time, in an argument against the conflation of humanitarianism and human rights, Brauman has advocated against the use of MSF témoignage in legal cases because, in Weizman’s summary of the position, “that would abuse their testimony for purposes that had nothing to do with humanitarianism.”32

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166 Re-purposing Témoignage Fabrice Weissman, member of the MSF Foundation, provides something of a counterhistory by downplaying the witnessing and advocacy but without sacrificing, along with other contributors to Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, a remarkable candor about the compromises inherent in MSF’s humanitarian work. Noting that “[c]ontrary to the image popularized by the media and MSF itself, the idea that silence was necessary to action was held by a majority of its founding members,”33 Weissman posits a televised MSF denunciation of the Khmer Rouge in 1977 as the moment témoignage began in immediate conjunction with an internal organizational debate about its ethical parameters which continues today. The year 1977 is significant in the development of human rights discourse, according to Samuel Moyn’s historiography of the human rights movement. Engaged in what one scholar has called the “paradigm shift from political ideology to human rights”34 in the late 1970s and 1980s, MSF’s ethos of témoignage evolved contemporaneously with the ascension of human rights as arguably “the last utopia,” a “terrain of idealism” emerging not out of “long-term inevitability and moral self-evidence,” but following the “collapse of other, prior utopias, both state-based and internationalist.”35 Redfield concludes that “[t]émoignage appears less a matter of moral clarity than one of intense dispute.”36 These debates and discussions over what témoignage means, when it began, and why it matters indicates the high level of self-critique and explicit engagement with the moral parameters of MSF’s work, and the debates also have pragmatic ramifications. For MSF, the focus on medical relief and témoignage defines a scope of practice for logistical decision-making in its missions; at the same time, it may either foreclose political engagement at the very moment of its great necessity or, more optimistically, offer an alternative temporality to the long-term work of juridical, political, and economic change to the structural conditions of the crisis at hand. MSF’s expanding scope of practice from relatively short-term projects to the development of longer-term missions as well (e.g., the treatment of endemic diseases such as malaria or HIV/AIDS, or the establishment of programs in places of chronic medical need, such as Haiti where MSF has worked since 1991) impacts the requirements of its operations as well as the temporal, spatial, and formal dimensions of témoignage. This expansion of MSF’s medical focus calls for témoignage to attend more strenuously to the historical dimensions of crisis, although it also indicates the growing responsibilities of governmentality in this nongovernmental organization. When crisis becomes condition, and exceptionality generates other forms of normalcy, no matter how unconscionable, certain humanitarian appeals— such as those built around crisis as shock and sudden rupture—lose their efficacy in galvanizing a response, demanding other narrative forms in their stead. Redfield describes how “[u]pholding humanitarian truth now clearly involved more than the direct display of broken bodies. In these emerging domains it increasingly required expertise.”37 In determining the priorities of its operations and funding them, then, MSF has developed new forms

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of expertise (including the capacity to generate its own epidemiological research). Whereas previously the doctor figured as “expert in matters of suffering,”38 the expanded scope of more recent projects would seem to demand a complex ethico-aesthetics to represent the organization’s work and to raise equally complex questions about the humanitarian subjects produced through its medical and biopolitical operations.

Humanitarian Spaces In ambiguous relation to the practice of témoignage is the concept of humanitarian spaces within which such projects take place. Redfield’s definition of these spaces echoes MSF’s ethos of operational neutrality, such that humanitarian space describes in his words a fiction that is “the ability of humanitarians to work freely in a given set of circumstances,” apart from the political failure and violence that surrounds it.39 Weizman’s study, drawn from interviews with former MSF president Brauman, nuances this definition: “humanitarian spaces are not territorial zones, but rather sets of operational categories, or space-bound circumstantial conditions, that make independent humanitarian work possible.” Not only are these ideal spaces physically distinct from conflict zones, they are gauged according to a set of basic freedoms transposed to conditions of medical exigency: “How freely you can talk to patients, how freely you can move around,” and so forth.40 In this formulation, MSF’s zone of political neutrality only exists through the careful analysis of and negotiation with the political, military, and economic forces that would constrain it; moreover its goal is to safeguard rights that might otherwise characterize the relationship of the democratic citizen to the state (e.g., the right to freedom of speech and freedom of movement) or the relationship between the medical humanitarian and the humanitarian subject (notably the rights in Bauman’s examples accrue to the humanitarian). In contrast to the sovereignty of the state, however, the medical humanitarian team—the physician, epidemiologist, operational logistics expert, communications officer, etc.—operates in what are in Weizman’s words “imaginary geography[ies] of humanitarianism” and “epistemic spaces” that produce conditions of physical existence and their own narratives of meaning.41 The photo/graphic narratives of MSF projects derive from and participate in the epistemic work of humanitarian spaces; however, in their later circulation, when the historical context and terms of address have changed, their imaginary geographies of humanitarianism proliferate new subjects and spaces and give new meaning to MSF’s sans-frontiérisme.42 Paul Amar provides an analytic of human-security states that illuminates how these new subjects and spaces remain deeply and conflictually embedded in various modes of governmentality. Whereas Amar emphasizes the shift from neoliberal models of governance that focus on privatization to human-security states’ articulation of humanitarian militarism and “human-security democracy,” through which networks of state and local,

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168 Re-purposing Témoignage NGO, and private interests manage populations within existing political borders, the example of MSF suggests the collusion between neoliberal and human-security frameworks. In addition, MSF’s humanitarian spaces are inevitably embroiled in these logics, notwithstanding the organization’s nonprofit and nonmilitarized functions. Human-security powers, according to Amar, produce “parahuman” subjects, whom he defines as “politically disabled ‘victim’ subjects that must, essentially, be constantly protected or rescued by enforcement interventions regardless of their consent or will to be rescued.” Subjectivization in this form takes place through hypervisibilization and then, correspondingly, securitization.43 Whereas MSF strategically mobilizes hypervisibilization in order to generate fundraising appeals and project reports, the outspoken features of témoignage work contradictorily as well. Hypervisibilization raises the profile of vulnerable populations in ways that might ultimately threaten the humanitarian spaces around them, exacerbating these populations’ vulnerability to attack or manipulation precisely because they have gained political currency. Such contradictions reflect the ways in which humanitarian spaces are not apart from the political spaces of violent sovereignty, neoliberal governance, nor human-security regimes, but are, to return to Weizman’s definition above, the “operational categories” within them.

The Structure of an Appeal Whereas témoignage may be directed to a targeted audience, as in a ­letter-writing campaign or human rights report, humanitarian appeals typically address themselves to as broad a public as possible to shape opinion and/or generate donations. Although the range of mediatized humanitarian appeals and the visual culture of suffering exceeds the possibility even to summarize it here, two forms of appeal have particular bearing on the techniques employed by the photo/graphic narratives of MSF. One form works through documentary-style photography and personal, representative stories of victims. This approach certifies the crisis as real and immediate, while simultaneously establishing a distance between the potentially beneficent, ostensibly safe spectator and the obviously vulnerable subject that renders a unilateral humanitarian gesture at once possible and necessary. The highly effective Bhopal Medical Appeal campaign discussed in the previous chapter is one such example. The humanitarian impulse in such efforts is quickened by “the articulation of justice with pity,” a f­ ormulation Lilie Chouliaraki describes as circulating through discourses of “grand emotion” toward those who suffer.44 Such appeals work primarily through structures of identification, however problematic and misplaced, and aim to move the spectator from the position of voyeur to one of the philanthropist. The full spectrum Chouliaraki defines moves from voyeur to philanthropist to activist and protester, a range that reflects her desire to theorize responses to appeals that go beyond passive consumption. In her important book,

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Re-purposing Témoignage  169 Women Witnessing Terror, Anne Cubilié describes these kinds of appeals (that range from voyeurism to philanthropy) in terms of spectatorship as opposed to witnessing: they promote a kind of consumerism of the pitiful other rather than an approach geared toward “(re)building an imaginary where the Other [i]s still possible” and “reformulat[ing] the universalized subject of human rights.”45 The stereotypical, spectacularized portrayals function through largely deterritorialized and depoliticized images of vulnerability in terms of abjection, bare life, and victimhood. Critics of Salgado’s stark yet beautifully rendered images find his aestheticization of suffering complicit in voyeurism and spectacle in these ways. Chouliaraki also identifies a “post-humanitarian” form of appeal, which focuses on the viewer rather than sufferer of atrocity, the addressee of the appeal rather than its subject. “Drawing upon playful textualities,” as opposed to realism, and embracing irony over pity, “this communicative structure challenges claims to ‘common humanity’ characteristic of earlier humanitarian genres, and replaces solidarity as action on human suffering with artful stories that promise to make us better people.”46 The “morality of irony,” according to Chouliaraki, transforms potential “solidarity into self-centred consumerism, [and] ultimately reproduces rather than challenges the existing relations of power between the West and vulnerable others.”47 Those who are suffering are bracketed when viewers’ identification with the humanitarian generates the force of the appeal. The Photographer and Burma Chronicles both employ some of these strategies, although to different effects. The two styles of appeal Chouliaraki defines, based on photorealism and pity on the one hand and ironic, postmodern textual play on the other, “fail to sustain a legitimate appeal to action on vulnerable others,” Chouliaraki argues, because neither interrogates the structural imbalances that divide secure and vulnerable worlds, nor “construe[s] the world as ‘common and shared’ to all.”48 In neither case does the appeal move the spectator further along the spectrum from voyeur to philanthropist to protester, who might participate in campaigns for assistance or justice. Although this scale is helpful in gauging the rhetorical address of a humanitarian appeal, it also raises the question of how humanitarian subjects might be similarly evaluated; or, to put it slightly differently, it reveals a humanitarian paradox. The movement Chouliaraki defines, from voyeurism to protest, invokes its shadow, the humanitarian subject who is silenced. Elora Chowdhury explains as well that when the object of the voyeur’s gaze gains entry to the political field, it is typically within the “‘progress narrative,’ the transformation of a victim to a survivor and then to an activist.”49 Victim or voyeur, the goal for both is the full embodiment of heroic agency that reasserts the liberal subject over its violation and, in doing so, masks other subjectivities and collective identifications. There is a discrepancy, in other words, between these formulations of the structure of an appeal, on the one hand, and, on the other, MSF’s critical

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170 Re-purposing Témoignage reflection on how humanitarian spaces produce heterogeneous subjects. For Wendy Hesford, humanitarianism is tied to “the logic of cultural recognition and its limitations in addressing social injustices.”50 These limitations include the “progress narrative” cited above and the specific identities that sustain it. This argument suggests that humanitarianism can only function through the production and circulation of recognizable identities—e.g., the starving child—which, in their plight, reinforce the idea that the liberal subject of rights may be found in particular, normativized bodies and identities. I employ MSF’s own evolving formulation of témoignage and humanitarian spaces to examine other modes of witnessing that might avoid the production of “empty empathy” and instead disclose “the structure of an injustice,” in E. Ann Kaplan’s words,51 and the differentiated subjects whom injustice has helped to produce but cannot fully define. The remainder of this chapter looks closely at the forms of témoignage, and the humanitarian spaces they describe, that have been re-purposed in the four primary texts by their photographers, graphic artists, and writers; I analyze them in relation to the matrix of MSF’s own principles and the theories of humanitarian witnessing discussed above. In their materiality as books, these photo/graphic narratives have a staying power and circulation that complicates the audience for and sense of immediacy implicit in conventional human rights appeals, news reports, and emergency medical relief efforts on the ground. This temporal shift can function in two ways: it can link an immediate crisis and the larger historical framework, through which it may be understood; or, it might sever témoignage from its originating contexts, so that the images appear to be free-floating signifiers of suffering, readily available for (mis)appropriation. In terms of their formal structures, photo/graphic narratives work through the dual compulsion to show and to tell (and the slippages between them), both of which manifest through the manipulations of the structure of a humanitarian crisis and space. Within the photo/graphic narratives, the double-time of crisis, immediate and rooted, also impacts the spatial dynamics of the texts, as spatial manipulations of, for instance, the size, shape, and proximity of individual panels can signify different time spans and as perspective can expand or contract the ostensible distance between the viewer and the subject. The scale of production of crisis in political and historical terms, in other words, may find a referent in the texts’ visualization and narrativization of it. More specifically, in their cross-discursivity and framing devices these books play with constructions of temporality and distance (moral, intersubjective, and geographical), that govern “the ethics of mediation[,] the humanization of vulnerable others”52 upon which both humanitarian responsibility and political subjectivity depend. Hillary Chute claims that graphic narrative provides an expanded “idiom of witness” within graphic narrative, and I extend that claim to all four texts despite their different media, in order to raise the question of who and what is being witnessed by the authors and their readers and to what end, especially when the event that generated the images has passed.53

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Re-purposing Témoignage  171 The texts under consideration here not only represent four distinct attempts to employ an expanded idiom of witness within the tradition of témoignage, they also take up key moments in that evolving ethos. Salgado’s Sahel: The End of the Road discloses a moment when MSF had to confront how humanitarianism can become coopted by state violence as well as the implications that speaking out has for the successful delivery of medical care. MSF’s decision to publicly condemn the Ethiopian government for using famine relief camps to manage populations it was fighting—by “lur[ing] the inhabitants of the rebel zones into places from where they would be forcefully transferred”54—resulted in the organization’s expulsion from the country. Weizman reports that MSF based its claims largely on others’ data, and it was in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, the focus of Guibert et al.’s The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders, that MSF established its first epidemiological office in order to conduct its own research and thus to strengthen both its medical and rhetorical actions. The projects in Afghanistan thus represent a response to the E ­ thiopian situation in the form of a significant expansion of MSF’s organizational mission. Another such expansion provides the context for Haviv et al.’s Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo. After a 2003 pilot project in ­Congo-Brazzaville, MSF recognized sexual violence as a criterion for action and research,55 and Haviv and his fellow Photo VII photographers document that new priority in their work. Finally, D ­ elisle’s Burma Chronicles shows how MSF’s internal debates come full circle when its members wrestle with implications of providing long term care that relieves the government of its responsibility to its people. Deciding that their humanitarian spaces have been instrumentalized by the state, one MSF group chooses to end its project in Burma.

Aesthetics and Vulnerability in Sahel: The End of the Road Sebastião Salgado produces some of the most recognizable and striking images of humanitarian and environmental degradation around the globe, and the photographic project, Sahel: Man in Distress, later also published as Sahel: The End of the Road, is one of his earliest works. The product of a fifteen-month project in 1984–5 to photograph the effects of drought in parts of Chad, Ethiopia (including the disputed Tigray province), Mali, and Sudan, the photographs were collected and published in different editions in France (1986) and Spain (1988) with proceeds going to MSF/Doctors without Borders; in addition, several of the photos appeared in contemporary news stories. MSF’s project focused on relief of the famine, which had its roots in both the drought and the military conflict between the Ethiopian government at the Marxist-Leninist Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. As Fred Ritchin writes in an introductory essay to the US edition of the book, only published in 2004, US coverage of the famine at the time largely ignored the political and military context to focus on the drought. Media

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reports and cultural responses highlighted narratives of natural disaster and short term crisis couched in the rhetoric of solidarity, charity and pity: Hands Across America, We are the World, a People magazine story, a portfolio of Salgado’s photos in the New York Times. The photographs gained more exposure in the US in 1990 when they were included in a traveling retrospective (and exhibition book) of Salgado’s work, An Uncertain Grace. As Ritchin notes, since Salgado’s work on the Sahel was rarely published in the US press at the time, the photographs’ engagement with the visceral reality of the famine and its aftermath was to some extent subverted, put off for another day. His images had to be labeled ‘art’ in order to be widely exhibited in the United States; their artistry rather than their urgency then became the focus of the critique. The recorded fact of people dying (what Susan Sontag called the ‘footprint’ of the photograph) and the concomitant issue of social responsibility—the stuff of the documentary—were short-circuited and made nearly irrelevant.56 Ritchin provides his critique in an introductory essay to the book, which at once underscores the importance of context in determining the legibility of the photographs and raises the question of how the book provides it. The contexts for Salgado’s project as a whole are multiple and conflicting: in keeping with the complex relationship between photojournalism and humanitarian NGO work, for example, Doctors without Borders announced the opening of its first office in the US in conjunction with the New York exhibition of An Uncertain Grace. What, then, is the context for the large format, beautifully printed volume, Sahel: The End of the Road, published two decades after the event it documents, depicting suffering so grievous that it is nearly impossible to imagine that many of its sufferers have survived? In what temporal framework do the photos exist today? What kind of responsibility do they call forth on behalf of those distanced by time, space, and, perhaps, by life itself? How might Salgado’s exquisite technical skill frame subjects, rather than bodies, on the threshold between life and death? What is the relationship between the idealized humanitarian space of action and the famine that Weizman wryly notes “was, however, real enough.”57 As noted above, in her analysis of television news reports of distant suffering, Chouliaraki offers a schema for analyzing the combined effects of visual and verbal reporting along a spectrum of possible outcomes for the spectator: the fascination and minimum pity of the voyeur, to the charity of the philanthropist, to the sense of indignation, outrage, injustice, or complicity that galvanizes the protester. She evaluates spatial representations according to how closely the subject and the subject’s background are related, the level of uniqueness and differentiation of environments, and the relationship depicted between safe and dangerous spaces. Temporal dimensions receive

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Re-purposing Témoignage  173 parallel attention according to when the event is taking place, whether its past, present, or future seems most important, and whether the future, if it is invoked at all, looms far or near.58 These criteria provide a framework for analyzing how suffering and the task of its amelioration are construed. In addition to these measures, I also ask how the relationship between MSF and humanitarian subjects, as well as relationships among those subjects, are defined. Moreover, in light of the historical displacement of the images of famine from 1984 to the present, I ask (following Judith Butler’s analysis of how grievable life is framed photographically59), if the photograph extends the event, what is the field in which both responsibility and subjectivity are newly constituted through Salgado’s book? In Sahel: The End of the Road, its visual and verbal elements are separate. Captions are published in the back of the book, rendering it more legible as an art book whose images can ostensibly stand apart from their contexts. This separation makes specific locations difficult to pinpoint; however, even without the captions the photographs depict a varied geography with direct bearing on human suffering. Through Salgado’s lens, the different regions of the Sahel range from an otherworldly depiction of a seemingly barren landscape which spectral humans traverse with unknown purpose, to an apocalyptic take on the end of human civilization (the vulture hovering above the famine camp; silent, naked, waiting children; or a littered, depopulated landscape). It is difficult to tell where humanitarian spaces begin and end. Other depictions offer a larger social context, however precarious, through long and close shots of outdoor spaces (an encampment; a pathway lined with water jugs) and indoor spaces devoted to the minimal necessities of medical care, food, and shelter. Those indoor spaces appear only slightly less catastrophic than the outdoor ones, in that the necessities of bare life surface in the carefully focalized mat, shawl, or bowl. What does this focalization signify? In one reading, these images represent bare life as Agamben conceives it, and the objects reference only their failure to sustain life—and, thus, the need for humanitarian aid from elsewhere. From another perspective, the presence of these objects, however basic, counters Agamben’s thesis by indicating that all life is always already social. Several photographs in the collection are carefully crafted to disclose the difficulty of distinguishing the living from the dead, and Salgado’s movement across collapsing categories of “presumed, possible, or certain death” emphasize the precariousness of the present moment. Although these images, too, might exemplify the threshold of bare life Agamben describes, the collapse of categories between life and death is also destabilizing to conventions of vulnerable subjectivity, and the images demand considerable “interpretative work by the public to complete what is not shown.”60 However, even at the threshold of life and death, as Agamben would have it, Salgado provides traces of social signification, although their precise meanings are not necessarily rendered. Depictions of MSF and other NGO staff (and their limited equipment) offer similarly disturbing and unsettling conclusions. Pictured in iconic

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174 Re-purposing Témoignage arrangements—in the operating room, hovering tenderly over a dying child—MSF staff are illuminated in relation to their patients, yet seemingly unable to save their lives. The viewer has as little access to their interiority as to those suffering the famine. Given that the role of activist and protester finds its ultimate expression in speech, it is significant that all the images function as silent testimonials, not just because they are photographs, but in their portrayal of a deep silence as opposed to speaking subjects. Although viewers in the Global North may more readily identify (based on conditions of existence) with the beneficent aid workers in the photos than with those depicted in the images who waver at the edge of life or who have already passed, those aid workers function pedagogically to model a humanitarian response for the viewer. At the same time, and to work against radical processes of othering, Salgado consistently renders the individuation and social bonds of the sufferers, not through speech or dramatic action which might reveal interiority or attempt to construct a phenomenological representation, but through gesture and proximity—the communal prayer, the sharing of water, a parent’s hand on a child. As David Levi Strauss writes about Salgado’s work, the perspectives he offers on his subjects “begin at compassion and lead from there to further recognitions. One of the first is that starvation does not obliterate human dignity. […] Salgado did not photograph passive victims, and pity does not suffice.”61 By paying close attention to these moments, viewers might also recognize the compassionate gestures among sufferers as perhaps insufficient to sustain life, but sufficient to making social meaning, and those gestures appear at least as powerful as those by the MSF staff. Strauss argues that Salgado’s ethico-aesthetics “[e]sche[w] the vaunted ‘objectivity’ of photojournalism[.] Salgado works in the realm of collective subjectivities, aspiring to that ‘transcendence of the Self that makes possible the epiphany of the Other.’”62 The language of transcendence and epiphany, borrowed from Emmanuel Levinas, also references the spiritual or sacred dimension of Salgado’s aesthetic, one that, depending on one’s point of view, removes suffering from the realm of the political or provides another, powerful vocabulary through which to articulate the terms of recognition of and responsibility to (rather than paternalistically for) those subjects. At its best in Levinasian terms, this aesthetic fosters the recognition of one’s responsibility to another that precedes identity and, thus, exceeds the terms of the encounter at hand and any singular gesture of beneficence. In Hesford’s summary of this ethical relation, “the face-to-face encounter”—which invokes humanity as a witness and echoes the Nobel Committee’s citation of MSF’s work—“breaks the objectifying gaze and moves beyond narcissistic recognition,”63 asking the viewer to look beyond him or herself toward a larger ethical frame. Hesford rightly insists on this ethical relation and the visual field in which it operates as socially mediated and historically contingent, rather than otherworldy or wholly abstract.64 In their temporal dimensions, Salgado’s

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Re-purposing Témoignage  175 preference for black-and-white photography contributes to the sacred aura of timelessness as the images seem take place in an undetermined past or present, seemingly escapable only through death. The “‘decisive moment’” of the photograph also exists; however, within a longer temporality that calls forth worldly responsibility.65 The collection provides a visual and verbal narrative of political failure and the insufficiency of humanitarian aid alone to compensate for it. Images of desperate migrations or a lone helicopter hovering in the background behind those suffering the famine aim to “‘provoke a discussion’ [… of] the issues behind the photographs.”66 Salgado’s iconic depictions of victims and aid workers and extraordinary care with framing, focus, and formal arrangement give the images a hyperdramatic quality that has been critiqued for romanticizing and aestheticizing suffering. This danger, when “the image tends to bring forth the formal properties of suffering […] and take attention away from the content of suffering as a painful reality for somebody out there in the world,”67 decreases through examination of the narratives implicit in the arrangement of the photographs and even more so if verbal and visual texts are reunited. To take the first third of the book as an example, the photographs move from stark images of sufferers against an unrelentingly desolate backdrop to the continuity of social bonds (men praying, children playing, a hand comforting the dying) in the camps to, finally, the importance of those bonds and their cultural expressions in death, visible in an image of three women reading next to two shrouded corpses in an unmarked landscape. The captions offer a richer context for the photos not only in their descriptive content—the form of narration that merely confirms the fact of suffering and aligns closely with the perceptual realism of the image itself— but also in what Chouliaraki terms their narrative and expository functions: including elements of storytelling (galvanizing emotion toward the suffering depicted) and argument or opinion in the pursuit of justice.68 In the expository mode, for instance, the caption for the first photograph in the book, of two distant figures walking out of the frame across a desert landscape bare except for a distant mountain and a gigantic bush in the center of the photo, reads: “On the outskirts of Tokar. Before the drought of 1973, this region was perhaps the most prosperous in the Sudan. It was the chief supplier of cotton, the source of wealth for this delta population. Now the warehouses are empty and the villages deserted. Sudan, 1985.”69 The caption is noteworthy not only for its attention to history (thereby stretching the moment of the photograph), but also for its insistence on describing what the photograph does not show: a population, warehouses, villages. Another caption, for a photograph of the shrouded corpses of an adult and child on the ground, surrounded only by a few footprints, stones, and dead grass, expresses outrage at the political failure that both initiated the journey and led to this conclusion: “Welo province, Ethiopia. They have walked, crossing mountains, enduring hunger and cold. They have hidden and waited, clinging to hope, and have pressed onward. But why flee? Why walk so far

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176 Re-purposing Témoignage and suffer so greatly only to end up like this? Ethiopia, 1984.”70 Here, too, the caption exceeds the precise limits of the photograph with its ambiguous temporality in verb tenses and distance between the speaker and the subjects, an ambiguity that allows the caption to describe others who have (or had) not (yet, perhaps) met the same end. On first view, Sahel: The End of the Road is striking for the beauty of its images and the care with which Salgado treats his subjects. That care, however, is far removed from the crisis it documents. Upon closer examination, the photographer’s care seems only to matter to the extent that it allows the subjects’ own social existence, which persists in extremity, to suffuse the image. One of Chouliaraki’s metrics of the spectrum from voyeur to protester is mobility “which connects the contexts of safety and danger, suggesting a specific relationship of action between them.”71 Mobility in that sense increases when captions and images are reunited, particularly in the context provided by the front matter of the book, with its critique of US publishers’ earlier refusal of the material; however, mobility might also signal the lack of a relationship of action in light of the distance of the book and its readers from its subjects. As noted above, the images “provoke a discussion” rather than outline a response. Even the effort to cultivate philanthropy is limited by its only tenuous reminders of the project’s link to MSF. While not proscriptive, Salgado’s images consistently portray suffering as a form of injustice, and as his photographs “leave remarkably durable afterimages that reappear long after one walks away from them,”72 they might foster deliberation in anticipation of a shared future. His visual language of epiphany and transcendence speaks at once to the radical humanity of the vulnerable as well as to the enormity of the gap between recognizing that humanity and the political will to act to protect it. That gap echoes in the book’s silence about the disjunction between the durability of Salgado’s images in Sahel: The End of the Road and the brevity of MSF’s mission it documents. In Weissman’s history of the highly publicized project, MSF “came to realize that the food distribution centres were traps” and that food became a bargaining tool to depopulate rebel areas; however as that realization took place, “[t]hose who refused to go were taken at gunpoint [and …] at least 100,000 people died while being transferred or during the first three months of resettlement.”73 Although the photographic captions mention transit camps and resettlement plans, their larger political context and the collateral damage of humanitarian relief goes unremarked. The photographs alone cannot convey that scope of the deportations and political deaths or their relation to the casualties that resulted from famine. Nor do they reflect the conflicted position of the staff in Ethiopian famine relief centers. The “textual economy”74 of témoignage in this context remains difficult to calculate. Whereas MSF’s overt attempt to challenge state violence and to avoid complicity with it resulted in the expulsion of its project, An Uncertain Grace and Sahel: The End of the Road work in part to generate support for the organization if not for alleviation

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Re-purposing Témoignage  177 of the particular crisis they represent. And although original publication and exhibition of the photographs effectively reinforced the dominant narrative of famine, as opposed to military conflict, for instance, in Ethiopia, Sahel: The End of the Road opens up a wider range of interpretations. Among them is an echo of the paradox described above, that Salgado depicts the social life of his humanitarian subjects. Unfortunately, there is little indication that they remain to claim it. This paradox also highlights certain limitations to theories of vulnerability. Recent articulations of vulnerability theory by Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson, and Anna Grear, in philosophical and human rights/legal contexts, insist on a heterogeneous reading of vulnerability to emphasize not just vulnerability to violence (as implied by Butler’s earlier theorizations in Precarious Life) but also vulnerability in terms of “ecstatic relationality”75 or “potentiality,” openness, and interconnection.76 Salgado’s depictions of the intersubjective gesture that denotes social relationships and an ethics of care that extends beyond the threshold of bare life are examples of these layered meanings of vulnerability; however, the images in their original and re-­purposed formats still function primarily as silent testimonials of what Amar called “politically disabled victims.”

Experience, Expertise, and Responsibility in The Photographer Whereas documentary-style photography is often associated with spectacularized suffering, graphic narratives are often described as foregrounding the related processes of framing and deliberation. According to Hillary Chute, graphic narrative’s formal characteristics, particularly its overt attention to the structures of representation, produce the necessary conditions for ethical engagement: “Its formal grammar rejects transparency and renders textualization conspicuous, inscribing the context in its graphic presentation.”77 As its title suggests, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders, approaches this task through a focus on Didier Lefèvre as both subject of his 1986 photographic assignment with MSF and witness to the medical team’s work. Whereas in Salgado’s portfolio the aestheticization of the images invokes the photographer, even if he remains invisible, in The Photographer Lefèvre is both witness and character. Lefèvre’s two roles are reflected in the multi-modal narratives that compose the book as well its shared authorship: Lefèvre’s black-and-white photographs, Emmanuel Guibert’s graphic narrative (based on Lefèvre’s stories of his trip and undertaken thirteen years later), and Frédéric Lemercier’s design and coloring of the final product. These different modes of storytelling blend into one another: the different forms are interwoven and interspersed to tell the story, graphic narrative textual frames overlay some photographs, and an earthy palette that, especially in a book of this length, which requires a sustained reading, emphasizes the formal parallels between

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178 Re-purposing Témoignage the graphic and photographic storylines. The interaction of these modes of representation moves the reader back and forth between what Lefèvre sees and how he reacts. The author-witness thus serves at once as a surrogate and a model for the more removed viewer (the reader), compressing the distance between them as well as between the viewer and the subjects of Lefèvre’s work, even as it offers, accordion-style, to expand that distance by displacing concern for humanitarianism’s subjects onto that of the witness. The different modes of storytelling also amplify the recursivity of graphic narrative and thus its temporal complexity.78 As Chute explains, graphic narrative “compels because it is so capacious, offering layers of words and images— as well as multiple layers of possible temporalities—on each page.”79 In representing “time as space” through the progression of discrete frames that make up the narrative sequence, the form makes it possible to see multiple temporalities on a single page and to revisit them in the process of scanning and close reading.80 These effects are compounded in The Photographer by the braiding not just of different graphic elements into narrative cohesion,81 but also of the multiple perspectives on any given page between Lefèvre as witness and subject. The Photographer traces Lefèvre’s journey from relative innocence and naïveté to experience as he accompanies a small MSF group in a caravan into northern Afghanistan to staff their small, remote clinics. Beginning and ending in Paris, the book is divided into three parts, documenting his introduction to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and MSF’s work; the arduous trek across war zones (the story takes place three years before the end of the Soviet invasion which lasted from 1979 to 1989), high mountain passes and rivers, and the work at the clinics; and Lefèvre’s decision to leave the group and return to Pakistan and then home on his own. Although the medical work is at the literal center of the book and is portrayed with genuine admiration, the narrative arc and dramatic tension depend on Lefèvre’s direct, personal experiences, reaching their climax in his dangerous departure without the rest of the MSF team and his near death. The visual centerpiece of the book, a double-page spread of what he believes will be his last photo, follows an extended, gray-scale graphic narrative sequence of his guide abandoning him on a high pass, his losing his temper at his exhausted horse, and his lying down in the path to write his last diary entry and take his final photos: “I take out one of my cameras. I choose a 20mm lens, a very wide angle, and shoot from the ground. To let people know where I died (Click.).”82 The close attention to the photographer’s craft at this moment reflects how closely MSF’s expertise is tied to representational practices as well as to medical, epidemiological and operational ones. Switching to Lefèvre’s direct perspective, three large format photographs of his horse on the rough rock and snow path and against a stormy background lead to the panoramic view of the forbidding, seemingly uninhabited pass and valley below. The progression in image size and realism of the preceding images and poignant text that sets up this photograph

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Re-purposing Témoignage  179 enhances its emotional weight and invites the viewer’s direct identification with it. The viewer has access to the same perspective Lefèvre thought would be his last. This dramatic image—devoid of signs of war, MSF, or Afghan people—locates suffering solely within the photographer who has left the humanitarian space of MSF to test himself against the rigors of Afghanistan. His departure reverses the terms of humanitarian protection: once outside of the operational categories of MSF where he was a participant-­observer, he is subject to heightened risks of being a foreigner in a remote, conflict zone, where he is dependent upon regular Afghans for his daily protection and care. Setting out with his guide, he describes “the pleasant sensation of being in control of my own trip”83—an illusion that quickly becomes apparent, whereas he is dependent on others: his guide, an imam, villagers praying in the mosque, those who host him each evening, and other travelers he meets on the trail who are not searching for refuge, but engaging in their daily lives. Although the book portrays the precarity of rural Afghan existence during wartime, when the photographer attempts his own heroic journey of independence, the depiction of Afghans shifts to focus on the multiplicity of their subject positions, whereas he becomes hypervisible and vulnerable. The focus on Lefèvre functions as a (successful, if the measure is the wide circulation of The Photographer) narrative device that provides a compelling point of identification for distant readers curious about MSF or Afghanistan as well as an example of “inequality of lives” inherent in humanitarianism.84 Analyzing the ways in which the organization distributes risk among local and foreign staff and among staff and humanitarian subjects, Didier Fassin, the former MSF board member, writes that inequalities result not from “theoretical premises or from individual prejudices. They are structural aporias of humanitarianism which are grounded in the asymmetry of the objective risk of death and of the subjective relation of compassion.”85 The Photographer revisits those asymmetries and makes them available for scrutiny, especially when the risk Lefèvre willingly takes exposes the heterogeneous ways in which humanitarian spaces work. The challenge of reading symmetrical and assymmetrical relationships carries over into the structure of the book as well. On the one hand, Lefèvre’s photographs, dark in tone, dense in visual content, and large in number, appear in small, sometimes tiny format that usually corresponds to the size of the much-simpler graphic narrative frames, yet makes the rich subject matter of individual photographs difficult to discern completely. On the other hand, the relationship between the two media provides multiple contexts through which to consider the position of Lefèvre in relation to the MSF team and those whom they treat. This interplay of graphic and photographic content establishes Chute’s “expanded idiom of witness, a manner of testifying that sets a visual language in motion with and against the verbal in order to embody individual and collective experience, to put contingent selves and histories into form” (original emphasis).86

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180 Re-purposing Témoignage The idiom of witness constructed out of the juxtaposition of photographs and graphic narrative also points toward its limitations in conveying the meaning of the suffering it represents. In a particularly wrenching sequence, the team visits the village of Püstük soon after a bombing campaign. In a corner of a bakery full of wounded villagers, they find a mother “watching over two of her children, a teenage girl and a baby, both bloodied. The little boy is maybe two or three. He hardly moves but from time to time let’s out a little wail of ‘aoh.’”87 The discrepancy between the size of starkly drawn, otherwise empty frames of “aoh” that alternate with and slightly overlap larger photos of the boy only hint at the tragedy unfolding. A half-page photograph of the boy and his sister, the boy looking directly at the photographer (and, thus, the reader), seems to invite humanitarian identification with this innocent victim of war, a process reinforced by a graphic frame of Lefèvre reloading his camera as he and the MSF team leave the bakery to tend to another wounded child. This time both camera and imagination fail: a two-page graphic spread uses the visual corollaries of the circular light of the physician’s headlamp with the holes in the wall to stand in for a smaller, more deadly hole. “It’s not a dot, it’s a hole,” John, one of the p ­ hysicians, tells Lefèvre. “A fragment of shrapnel got in there and cut the spinal cord. That means she’ll never walk again.”88 The size of a grain of rice, the hole is left to the reader’s imagination as Lefèvre cries silently in the corner. The narrative picks up the thread of the previous casualty on the next page when Juliette Fournot, the team leader, tells them that the little boy in the bakery has died. Here the narrative once again underscores the failure of witnessing. Lefèvre learns that the boy’s cry, “aoh,” meant “thirsty,” a small detail that nonetheless destroys the illusion of knowing implicit in the ostensibly obvious earlier portrayal of the child’s victimhood. How can someone help who cannot even distinguish a most basic request? Although Juliette filmed the boy’s death (“The mother said to me, ‘Film it, Jamila. People have to know”), those images, too, are missing from the narrative, creating a gap between what the MSF staff and the Afghan villagers witness and what Lefèvre and the reader can see and know.89 Crucially, in that example, the vulnerable subject directs the work of witnessing. Even more overtly than in Salgado’s photographs, this framing of what is illegible to the witness but not to the subject (a frame that refuses to yield its specific content to the reader) provides an opening for the corporeal, desiring, vulnerable, and knowing subjectivities of the Afghans MSF treats, without delimiting those subjectivities into fixed categories of identity. In other words, rather than depict victims, survivors, and corpses, the book reveals people in their own familiar context sometimes dying, but also surviving, caring for one another, healing, traveling, and so forth. In this way, although the protagonist is Lefèvre, the book also offers a multi-perspectival portrayal of the differentiated, yet entangled relationships of MSF staff and local people. The idiom of witness of the graphic narrative also has a pedagogic function as it reflects Lefèvre’s admiration for the MSF team and distress at the

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Re-purposing Témoignage  181 individualized and specific suffering of the Afghan people he witnesses. At the same time, it situates the photographs in specific cultural, gendered, geographic, and political contexts. The complex relationship between the MSF team—“those who have a moral involvement in the humanitarian project, who are called ‘volunteers’ but receive a regular salary”—and himself as one of “those who are not related to the humanitarian saga, since they are simply ‘employed’ by the organization” emerges, for instance, in his decision to return on his own.90 This relationship only gestures toward the web of biopolitical, geopolitical, and biocapital governmentality through which MSF operates, and it emphasizes the personal interactions that take place in remote projects, rather than the larger political and economic structures of nation-states. What the narrative demonstrates through its interplay of forms and perspectives, in other ways, are the constantly shifting calculations of viability and value that take place through humanitarian imbrication in the “political,” particularly the biopolitics of people’s lives. When Lefèvre decides to leave the team early to head home, Lefèvre and Fournot debate over the next sixteen frames who has responsibility for his safety now that his specific task of documenting the work at the clinic has ended (Fig. 4.1). Whereas earlier they shared a responsibility to the project under Juliette’s direction, responsibility for personal security becomes subject to trade as they negotiate their positions vis-à-vis one another: “So I’m handing back to you the responsibility that I have over you. You’re a big boy. If you want to leave, leave,” Juliette finally tells him.91 The gendered language works on multiple levels to situate responsibility in a larger context: it reflects Juliette’s frustration with his insistence on leaving the group and denotes the limits of humanitarian reach (it extends into the private lives of Afghans who need MSF medical aid, yet is negotiable for staff and contracted employees); it features as a significant milepost in Lefèvre’s own quest as hero in his own story “to be left to my own devices and have to manage”; and it references an extensive portrayal earlier in the book

Figure 4.1  MSF Team Leader Juliette Fournot and photographer Didier Lefèvre. The Photographer ©2009 by Emmanuel Guibert. Reprinted by permission of First Second Books, an imprint of Henry Holt & Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

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182 Re-purposing Témoignage of the cultural sensitivity of the MSF team and of Juliette in particular to work responsibly in local contexts.92 “Her role, and her immersion in Afghan society where she spent her teenage years,” as Chris Hedges notes, “repeatedly shatters easy stereotypes about Afghan and Muslim culture.”93 Juliette’s acquiescence to Lefèvre’s demand for independence also echoes the latent maternalism in humanitarian responsibility more broadly, invoking at once an ethics of care and the structural imbalance of parents and children. The interplay of graphic narrative and photography provides a richer frame for the absence of any visual depiction of war as direct conflict in the book. If graphic narratives as témoignage potentially “put pressure on dominant conceptions of trauma’s unrepresentability,”94 as Chute argues, without masking their own representational strategies, here the two narrative strands reveal the war through “damage done to bodies and souls by shells, bullets, and iron fragments, and the frantic struggle to mend the broken.”95 Although the graphic narrative portion of the text emphasizes the telling of Lefèvre’s personal story, it also invites a deeper reading of the photographs by characterizing the photographer’s emotional reaction to the suffering he captures on film. The photographs, meanwhile, emphasize proximity to their subjects and the proximity of those subjects to danger: the ground-level view of Lefèvre’s shot on the pass, close-ups of the basic surgery available in remote locations for wounds caused by shrapnel and household accidents, the view MSF staff have from the porch of their rudimentary clinic. Blurrier are the larger political forces that contribute to the population’s medical needs and determine the conditions of humanitarianism itself. Although the book includes a brief introductory essay and concluding “Portraits” section with details on how the lead characters have fared between the 1986 mission and the publication of the book almost two decades later, these function primarily to burnish MSF’s aura of brave sacrifice coupled with its staff’s expertise. One MSF report published during the period the book documents references how Cold War rivalries impact the project: “With one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council directly involved in the combat, the organization’s efforts were severely hampered by superpower rivalry.”96 In The Photographer, however, even oblique political commentary is scant. The work’s 1986 geopolitical dimensions are also obscured for many readers by subsequent conflicts in Afghanistan from the period of Taliban control to the US bombing of the country post-9/11 to the reader’s present, each of which also extends the marketability of the book by referencing a place at once distant and newsworthy. That distance is temporal as well as spatial: like Salgado’s images of the Sahel, Lefèvre’s portfolio of Afghanistan photographs from the 1986 trip would only be widely available through the book, published more than two decades later and, therefore, contextualized more readily in terms of post-9/11 rather than Cold War conflicts. Finally, because the book functions as a posthumous tribute and memorial to Lefèvre and his attachment to Afghanistan, as well as to the dedication of humanitarian workers (and was published

Re-purposing Témoignage  183 long after the Soviet invasion it documents), it supports MSF’s broad ethos of medical humanitarianism and témoignage, rather than elevating any specific project.

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Gendering Humanitarianism and Témoignage in Forgotten War The complicated relationship between photojournalism, témoignage, and medical relief also characterizes Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, and James Nachtwey’s Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo.97 The book is a product of one of several collaborations between MSF and the VII photo agency, formed by an initial seven photojournalists in September 2001 “to produce an unflinching record of injustice and the people caught up in the events they depict.”98 The relationships MSF builds with VII and other photojournalists take different forms, from paid assignments to “provid[ing] access and logistical ­support—including local transportation, meals, lodging, and information— to photographers who are working on issues or in regions where MSF is also working.”99 Both parties recognize the complexity of this relationship, especially when photojournalists gain access to stories with only limited obligations to MSF for the resulting images. From a photojournalistic perspective, as David Walker writes, “For nearly 40 years, Doctors Without Borders […] has been a catalyst for world-class journalism from difficult places around the globe. And its role in bringing epidemics and humanitarian disaster to the world’s attention is bound to expand as news organizations cut back their international coverage.” Here MSF, whose operational principles do not include journalistic norms, performs an expanded role as an intermediary between their humanitarian subjects and a wider public. Yet that access for photojournalists is also circumscribed by MSF security guidelines and priorities, as MSF representative Jason Cone explains in the same article: “‘They can’t just jump out of the car and shoot’ wherever and whatever they want, Cone says. ‘We’re an NGO. We’re not about independent journalism. We’re up front with [photographers] about that. They have to be willing to accept that they might be held back in terms of their reporting.’”100 Forgotten War, a small format, limited run volume of five photographers’ perspectives of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2004, is neither strictly photojournalism nor aesthetic representation, although many of the images draw attention to their own formal characteristics. It functions most clearly among the books under consideration here as a form of témoignage in MSF’s own terms. With a foreword by MSF executive director Nicolas de Torrenté, the volume aims to “make visible to the world” the cost of war, endemic disease, and sexual violence upon local populations in the DRC and to motivate the spectator’s refusal of “a kind of normalization of the unacceptable,” meaning both short and long-term crises, depicted in the images.101 The introduction also instructs viewers to see both individuals

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184 Re-purposing Témoignage and the larger contexts of war, gendered violence, and disease in the images that follow. Framed with injunctions to remember the present and to witness individuals living in the “normalization of the unacceptable,” the book engages rhetoric of potential temporal and spatial proximity. That the war has been “forgotten,” for instance, implies that it was once known; that the viewer will see how conditions of extremity can become “normal” as opposed to exceptional, implies that everyone shares an understanding of what those terms signify. The movement from immediate crisis to persistent need also clears space for deliberation of the very kinds of normalcy MSF cites at the heart of its objectives. Within MSF operational, medical priorities, when narratives of crisis are supplanted by longer histories and conditions, humanitarians “confront the task of evaluating forms of suffering […]—in effect, adjudicating within the very categorical value of life that they hold dear.”102 Triage manifests in Forgotten War as well: the decision of what to shoot and what to publish in this context reflects the photographers’ vision of what ought to be different, determinations that can only be made in the context of evaluating what might count as “normal” in different contexts, along with the structural inequities that undergird those attributions. Their five portfolios within the book focus, in order, on internally displaced persons in different regions and camps; Bunia, with particular attention to its hospital; HIV/AIDS patients at an MSF clinic in Bukavu; sex workers in Kinshasa; and individuals suffering the effects of malnutrition, disease, and war in various districts of the DRC. This sequence of subjects offers an exposition of how the radical social disruptions inflicted upon civilian populations in war, rather than primarily the wounds of weaponry, lead to severe, acute, and chronic forms of suffering; and at the center of the book, suffering is linked explicitly to gender and sexuality. The arrangement of portfolios situates the overtly medical, institutional work of MSF in the hospital and clinic within the larger project of witnessing extreme social upheaval and endemic suffering. The structure and themes of the book parallel, in other words, MSF’s dual responsibility for medical aid and témoignage. More specifically, the book stages an argument for the expansion of MSF’s priorities from acute to both acute and chronic conditions. That shift takes place in part through representations of gendered embodiment that layers the vulnerable subject with social meaning. The individual portfolios have distinct aesthetic perspectives on their subjects which, taken together, offer high degrees of the concreteness, multiplicity, and specificity of suffering that figure in Chouliaraki’s schema of how an image addresses its audience.103 Haviv’s color photographs of internally displaced persons, for example, feature contrasting colors and striking lines that lead the eye to different corners of the images and create tension with whatever image of suffering lies at the center (an illuminated cross at a child’s funeral, a woman framed by bedsheets in the hospital, a United Nations truck departing down a dusty road). These images contrast with the

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Re-purposing Témoignage  185 final black-and-white portfolio by Nachtwey, whose intimate perspective often focuses on gesture: a mother stretching her arms over her sick children, a wife comforting her husband, or MSF staff treating their patients. Significantly in these photos, Nachtwey shows only the hands of MSF workers, at once keeping the focus on the patients and inviting a philanthropic response. Whereas in Salgado’s photographs, gesture invokes the bonds of a shared sociality even on or beyond the threshold between life and death, in Nachtwey’s work gestures gain more specific social meaning through their temporal and spatial contexts. The images are more clearly located in specific times and places, favoring the quotidian elements of embodied suffering over their more unlocatable representation. In the photograph of the mother with arms outstretched over her two children, for example, her pose is iconic, but rooted in specificity. With its caption denoting the specific subject positions, physical location, and physical vulnerability of its inhabitants, the image alters the perspective on vulnerable subjects. MSF staff, who are not featured in the image, do not rescue victims but presumably provide a humanitarian space in which subjects can participate in their own sustaining care and fulfill existing social roles. Moreover, in place of the abstracted landscapes that provide the backdrop of many of Salgado’s images, Nachtwey’s photograph clearly defines that humanitarian space in terms that are both suggestive and material, from the unfocused interiority of the hospital to its geographic locale. Between these bookends, Kratochviv’s portfolio of an MSF AIDS clinic features much more abstracted images, often with a body part of the foregrounded patient (a bent back, an x-ray, a head) blurred against a focalized background. His images thus bespeak their own limits and draw attention to a situated perspective, as opposed to one that tries to mimic a coherent, objective, totalizing, or unanchored view. Kratochviv’s one direct, focused portrait of a female AIDS patient has a double-page spread in the book and, although her face fills the page with only the suggestion of a clinic room behind her, the caption references the MSF staff omitted from the photo: “An AIDS patient being cared for by MSF doctors at a local hospital in Bukavu.” This, too, reminds the viewer of the limits of what is visible and of the importance of the patient’s individuated subjectivity within this humanitarian space. Knight’s tilted and askance perspectives and Ladefoged’s depictions of sex workers also often juxtapose body parts of various subjects, techniques which again refute any suggestion of either a complete or self-evident perspective, and carefully avoid a masculinized consuming and colonial gaze over the sexualized bodies of women and men. In one image, Ladefoged depicts a patient on a gurney, lying beneath a poster of a pregnant woman’s belly and being examined at the MSF sex worker clinic. The photograph underscores its own status as representation and plays with the question of visual address. The poster admonishes its viewers to be responsible, and responsibility in the poster is defined by the pregnant woman’s hands encircling her belly and the command, “Proteger a seu

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186 Re-purposing Témoignage bebé/contra a aids/é mais do que un dever/É un direita” [Protect your baby against AIDS/It is more than a right, it’s a duty]. In Ladefoged’s photograph the poster’s caption and image, and thus the scope and locus of responsibility, is also referenced through the position of the actual patient and the MSF doctor: their hands respectively expose and examine the patient’s abdomen. Rather than provide a clear portrait of injustice, duty and responsibility, activated by the reference to the vulnerable, unborn child, the photograph portrays complex and competing narratives. The poster with its white body of the pregnant woman, Portuguese text, imperative tone, and language of rights and duties offers at once an ironic reminder of the DRC’s earliest European contacts and, perhaps for some viewers, the centuries-long history of disastrous foreign involvement. It provides a visual trace of a history of racial oppression rationalized in the language of modernization, here in terms of medical expertise, particularly in the ways that colonial power so often played out upon women’s bodies. The body (naked except for a partial sleeve) in the poster is moreover marked by biology (race and pregnancy), whereas the living subjects of the photograph—the doctor and the patient— are defined socially through visual referents such as the doctor’s white robe and patient’s silver-painted toenails. The ostensible “natural” everyday of maternal love and responsibility in the poster, which is apparently not so natural that it can avoid a stern reminder, contrasts vividly with the social contexts of the subjects. Finally, none of these three focal points—poster, patient, or physician—invites the viewer’s identification. Instead, the viewer’s gaze is deflected by the back of the doctor’s robe and a bright jacket hanging on a doorframe. The proximity the camera provides to this semi-­ intimate scene can only be justified, then, through a consideration of the historical, medical, political terms that make it possible. To the extent that the images in Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of Congo serve as an injunction to remember and respond, they do so because the roots to the crisis are long, tangled, and transnational and its scope so pervasive. As opposed to the visual language of epiphany and transcendence of Salgado’s work, these photographers underscore the impossibility of a full revelation of distant sufferers through off-kilter framing, the tension between focused and blurred subjects, and the insistence on partial perspectives. The depictions of ostensibly private moments, including the sense of intrusion the camera conveys in images of naked women in childbirth or family members mourning a dead child, provide concrete examples of just what the “normalization of the unacceptable” might include (including an international organization’s long reach). Rather than a proximity of intimacy and immediacy, the images illuminate and demand recognition of that “asymmetry of power” between spectator and sufferer, that “proper distance” Chouliaraki argues is necessary for the pursuit of justice. The images do not circle back, so to speak, to remind the viewer to contribute to MSF’s work so much as frame the scope of the crisis in large and complex terms that exceed the capacity of any single organization to respond to it.

Re-purposing Témoignage  187

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Irony and Self-Critique in Burma Chronicles The graphic narrative Burma Chronicle would seem to fit neatly in Chouliaraki’s category of post-humanitarian, textual play with its use of irony and the ease with which readers in the Global North might identify with Delisle as the protagonist. Delisle’s memoir, perhaps in keeping with its greater distance from official MSF discourse, offers instead a wry commentary on the aid world and the culture of visual immediacy and verifiability to which it is linked as well as on the lack of political transparency in Burma itself. The tone and style of the book most clearly render humanitarian spaces in terms of “operational categories, or space-bound circumstantial conditions, that make independent work possible” (or determine its impossibility).104 The book’s self-deprecating irony in both image and voice steers away from sentimentality and self-congratulation. Through the narrator, the viewer stands tangentially to Burmese and MSF daily life, and can share humorously in Delisle’s concerns for air-conditioning, familiar food, and modern plumbing as he navigates his year in Burma with his wife, Nadège, and infant son, Louis. As a form of witnessing, this identificatory structure between reader and author/protagonist strenuously avoids pity and employs irony and humor not (only) to encourage the viewer’s consumerism but to underscore the ways in which dictatorship impacts people’s lives on the most quotidian levels as well as the compromises and paradoxes of NGO work in Burma. Delisle’s position as an MSF spouse and house parent facilitates this broad perspective; his effectiveness as a witness comes from being an outsider such that there is no illusion his witnessing is ever anything other than partial view rooted in his particularity and privilege in the social matrix. Although Delisle favors simple line drawings and gray-scale images, rather than erase complexity, his technique offers readers a tutorial on how to approach the details of the book. He includes a metatextual through-line on the book’s formal construction (obtaining ink, establishing a work routine at home), and these references invite the reader to look closely at his images and to be aware of what lurks just behind even the most cartoonish depictions. A three-panel sequence on the military shirts worn by civilians as opposed to the clothing of the country’s leaders, for instance, reveals that the latter have pockets at the bottom to make room for medal decorations on the chest.105 Focusing the viewer’s eye on such details, Delisle positions himself as character and narrator (each with a distinct voice, distinguished by voice bubbles and straight text) who teaches his audience how to read the drawings. The implicit dialogue between Delisle and his readers also invites the latter to share in an ironic, knowing pleasure at the military dictatorship’s attention to sartorial minutiae and self-aggrandizement, while recognizing that such attention also bespeaks much more serious interferences in the details of daily life. Throughout the book, perspective continually shifts between close-up views of quotidian details and distanced commentary on the larger political context. For instance, rudimentary depictions of the family’s house-hunting

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188 Re-purposing Témoignage travails underscore enormous disparities of wealth and infrastructure, the fear military leaders have of one another rather than of outside aggressors, and the privileges NGO staff have available to them. Here, too, Delisle draws from different vantage points that not only offer different angles on the same subject, but also mini-tutorials on how to evaluate what he depicts: the impractical residences of the elite (three-stories, Greek columns, tinted windows), for instance, versus the traditional model most Burmese have that “lets the air pass through under the roof and has a shady spot below that stays cool year round.”106 These representational strategies—­ simple drawings, shifting perspectives that incorporate context, and Delisle’s ­double-voice as character and narrator—correspond to the selection of his topics and offer an implicit critique of depictions that purport to show bare life, as opposed to daily life, in order to elicit an emotional response. Delisle’s minimalism works effectively to portray its own limitations in relation to those imposed by the government, as in the sequence introducing Aung San Suu Kyi which opens with “Nobel Prize” and a “no access” traffic sign. Showing the guard blocking the route to her house, Delisle the narrator remarks, “We won’t be getting a look at the home of the world’s most famous political prisoner.”107 That “we” refers ironically to Delisle and Louis out for a walk as well as the reader, and what follows depicts what “we” cannot see in the street-level perspective of the book. In a series of three panels arranged vertically, Delisle draws a tiny stick figure inside the bare outline of a house (Fig. 4.2). Aung San Suu Kyi is at once visible and invisible, existing in positive space that turns increasingly negative against the background of the diplomatic neighborhood where she lives. The caption of the leading panel makes the irony of her position explicit: “In fact, she’s not really a prisoner. She can’t leave her home, but she’s free to leave the country. Except that she has chosen to stay and, by her

Figure 4.2  House arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Copyright Guy Delisle; used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

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Re-purposing Témoignage  189 simple presence, resist one of the most oppressive regimes in the world.”108 “Staying” as political resistance has a temporal dimension, which Delisle captures by portraying in each of the three panels the static figure of Aung San Suu Kyi, immovable and silent, as day becomes night. The incongruence between the changes in the world outside versus the immobility of the figure within, who gets only barely larger as the narration of her life under house arrest continues, operate on both literal and metaphorical levels to underscore Aung San Suu Kyi’s role as a steadfast symbol of resistance against the repetitive monotony of the regime that imprisons her, a woman whose silencing during this period attests to her political standing. Perhaps as the book most distanced from official MSF discourses of témoignage, Burma Chronicles closely examines the paradoxes inherent in MSF and other humanitarian NGOs’ work in Burma. In highlighting the dilemma of defining “adequate humanitarian space to operate its programmes independently and without making unacceptable compromises to the authorities,”109 the book reprises MSF’s internal debates over its policies of operational neutrality, autonomy, and témoignage. In her essay, “‘Golfing with the Generals,’” Fiona Terry describes the three different paths chosen by MSF associations from France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands in Burma, based on those debates during the period Delisle also covers. Facing restrictions on the populations with whom they could work, control over their own aid distribution (in part through limitations on access to more remote clinics), and the level of témoignage possible without jeopardizing ongoing medical initiatives, the three groups reached different conclusions about the viability of their respective projects: MSF-H, separating itself from the others through the Dutch version of its name (AZG) and gaining the unwanted appellation of “golfing with generals” because of their willingness to compromise with the government in order to gain traction in the country, shifted focus from assisting populations in the politically sensitive Kachin State (“those affected by repression or armed conflict”) to broader health crises of malaria and HIV/AIDS. This switch enabled them to treat more people, but not those who provided the initial impetus for MSF-H presence in the country.110 The Swiss group, MSF-CH, facing similar restrictions on its scope of practice, elected to stay, Terry writes, so as “not to abandon the 500 patients it had recently put on antiretroviral drugs. To do so would be to sentence them to death. Hence in many ways, MSF-CH became hostage to their AIDS treatment programme.”111 In both of these decisions, the MSF groups opted for compromised care (that participated in the government’s denial of services to minority groups in the first case and alleviated the government’s need to provide treatment to HIV/AIDS patients in the second) over none at all. MSF-FR elected to depart, and Delisle portrays the debates leading up to the withdrawal that ended his own family’s stay in Burma. Earlier sections of the book provide important context for the debate, as the staff in Rangoon bemoan the permit restrictions that keep them from their projects and actively debate the terms through which their

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190 Re-purposing Témoignage humanitarian spaces are constructed. A typically ironic sequence titled “MSF (Doctors without Borders)” uses outlined square panels, several with maps of troop, medical project, and ethnic state locations, to describe MSF’s action plan. The only panel “without borders” shows a flow chart of the permitting path that includes several stops labeled “Minister of ???” as well as one for approval by the Minister of Defense.112 Delisle’s excursion, without a permit, on a MSF-FR field visit focuses humorously on his fear of malaria and his stomach ailments, such that his self-dramatization highlights the perpetual health risks faced by local populations—as well as the lack of a dramatic humanitarian response to them. On his one authorized visit to an AZG/MSF-H HIV/AIDS clinic, Delisle depicts himself from behind. The focal point is on the back of his head as he takes in the project and its patients: “Jeezus, I could never do this job.”113 Although these depictions offer little in the way of individual specificity of the patients, Delisle portrays himself unsanctimoniously, attempting to grasp the scope and the concreteness of suffering and its multiplicity. In these ways, Delisle attempts at once to represent the difficulty of the medical teams’ work, the precarity of the health of local populations, and the inevitable compromises that MSF’s medical humanitarianism requires. Most interesting are Delisle’s varying representations of mobility in ways that invoke Chouliaraki’s association of mobility with agency. On the one hand, depicting his visits to the children’s play groups (with local nannies on one side and the mothers on the other), parties at the Australian Club, and other fixtures of expatriate life, Delisle uses his own marginal position as a cartoonist—“I draw comics,” “Ah, lovely … What a nice hobby”114— to deliver an ironic commentary on the distance between life for the NGO staffers in the limbo of government regulations, on the one hand, and those who might receive medical assistance, on the other. This distance between the distributors and receivers of medical humanitarianism shrinks only during the field visits when Delisle sees the physicians who staff these clinics with limited supplies and often without permits for long periods. Delisle’s marginality serves as a foil for but also parallels such serious humanitarian work. In an example that reinforces the lesson of the generals’ shirt designs, his class with a small, local group of cartoonists inadvertently jeopardizes their safety, and he underscores once again the seriousness of the politics of representation under a totalitarian regime. These two roles—of comic, wry, and ironic observation on the one hand and potentially serious impact on local people on the other—merge as the tension increases in his own work with his class as well as among the MSF staff. The “Conversation” sequence depicts Delisle as the reader’s proxy, asking an MSF-FR employee to explain the organization’s recent decision to pull out of Burma. Over coffee and cigarettes, Delisle hears how MSF’s mandate “to help the most disadvantaged” has been subverted by government restrictions and redirections of its efforts, so that “Given the options, we’d rather go.”115 Others, his interlocutor explains, may stay because of better

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Re-purposing Témoignage  191 conditions, self-interest, or complacency. At the same time, the tone of the book leading up to this passage cautions the reader against any simple understanding of what complacency might mean in circumstances such as these, or who might be guilty of it. Although this sequence certainly does not direct the viewer to contemplate the medical suffering of Burmese people, through its dialogue and anti-heroics it raises pointedly the question of what complacency about the suffering of distant others looks like and what its ramifications may be. More than the other texts, Burma Chronicles foregrounds the politics of complicity, of which witnessing may be a part, rather than the relationship between the vulnerable subject and the medical humanitarian. Mobility receives an alternative expression in the final section of the book, “Ferris Wheel.” Following a humorous sequence in which the author attends his first Buddhist meditation retreat, the ferris wheel initially seems to offer a visual quote of the concept of samsara, or the cycle of suffering bound up with existence. As is typical in the book, this, too, resonates ironically when Delisle comments, “After a year here, I feel like I’ve seen what I needed to see,”116 as though his flight to France will release him from samsara. Picking up Louis at nursery school for his final stroller ride home before the family leaves Burma, they are intrigued by unfamiliar music and discover a small street fair with what appears to be a human-powered ferris wheel. This last page shows self-reliant entertainment and enjoyment, thereby construing MSF’s departure in terms that are banal by comparison. Possible readings of this last page proliferate to offer complementary conclusions. By poking fun at Delisle’s claim that he (and, thus, the reader) “has seen what [he/we] needed to see,” and demonstrating once again the perspectival limitations of the author-as-witness, the final panel of the book presents Delisle’s surprised expression juxtaposed to an unbounded frame of the man spinning the ride. Normalcy, not egregious suffering, is the surprise here, a conclusion that invites readers to suspend preconceived images that equate vulnerability with an image of victimhood that typically informs humanitarian appeals.

Conclusion: Political Potentiality and Bare Life Témoignage is central to MSF’s understanding of its own mission, and the practice actively participates in defining the chronotope of a crisis, the organization’s humanitarian spaces, and its subjects. Located at the intersection of humanitarianism and human rights, this dimension of MSF’s work and expertise discloses its humanitarianism as a project that entails both medical relief and the pursuit of justice, as well as one that is deeply embedded in the structures of neoliberal privatization and human-security logics. Because of its history of operational neutrality and non-state funding, MSF often couches témoignage in the rhetoric of a “transcendent conception of humanity” and in contrast to politics, which is itself read as “an ideological marker” and a “potential threat” to MSF’s stated neutrality.117 As Fassin

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192 Re-purposing Témoignage has shown repeatedly, this rhetorical stance masks the divisions between the inevitable adjudication of “three different types of life which are at stake in these extreme situations: lives to be saved, lives to be exposed, and lives to be told.”118 Notwithstanding its turn to universalizing rhetoric, the organization’s willingness to debate the merits and methods of témoignage (both internally and publicly) bespeaks its understanding of “the transactional basis of humanitarian autonomy.”119 In the end it is clear that transactions inevitably take place in a humanitarian “space for negotiations”120 that is precisely of politics rather than apart from it. Whereas Orbinski’s Nobel Prize address articulates MSF’s ethos in universalizing, moral terms, those terms are unsupportable in practice when judgments and decisions about triaging patients, the allocation of resources, the proper chronotope of crisis, the safety of its employees, and so forth must be made continuously. MSF’s expertise in and praxis of témoignage reflects a critical engagement with the terms of the organization’s biopolitical and geopolitical operations as it attempts to provide for, at minimum, the physical viability of vulnerable subjects in conditions of extremity. The re-purposed images of témoignage in the four books considered here respond to MSF’s evolving ethos and its organizational changes, including its growing epidemiological expertise, expanded chronotopes of crisis to include chronic medical needs, incorporation of gender violence among its criteria for action, and role as a conduit for transnational photojournalism of crisis and catastrophe. The texts’ spatial and temporal distance from their founding events means they are not making a direct appeal for financial or political support, or informing and raising awareness. Rather they are deeply engaged with the formal and interpretative problematics of humanitarian representation, and, thus, they invite readings of how humanitarian spaces and subjects are constructed. The features Chouliaraki defines regarding representation of the specificity, multiplicity, and mobility of humanitarians, their subjects, and their spaces provide one approach to understanding how texts shape the interpellation of their readers. These terms help to pinpoint the extent to which texts cultivate the reader or viewer’s identification with humanitarians (proximity), dis-identification with those suffering (distance), or an abstracted, sentimental universalism. Regardless of which mode is produced, these strategies revolve around identificatory relationships and ostensibly fixed subject positions, which is typical of humanitarian cultural production. But those typical forms of representation are at odds with MSF’s self-­ critical practice of témoignage. Thus, I examine how four books, to varying degrees, negotiate the partiality of their own constructions, historical embeddedness, and aesthetic qualities, all of which ask for reciprocal work of critique from readers. The spaces between panels, lag between taking and publishing a photograph, and gaps between captions and their referents offer sliding scales for the ethico-aesthetics of témoignage. For instance, whereas documentary, photo-realist campaigns such as Salgado’s emphasize the positive truth-value of witnessing through an aesthetic of direct, immediate

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Re-purposing Témoignage  193 portrayal of obvious suffering, the graphic narratives more overtly display the process and problematics of witnessing. Indeed, as Chute demonstrates, “[t]he diegetic horizon of each page, made up of what are essentially boxes of time, lends graphic narratives a representational mode capable of taking up complex political and historical issues with an explicit, formal degree of self-awareness.”121 Their different media notwithstanding, each of the texts displays this self-awareness in its own unique way; in doing so, they raise the question of whether the photo/graphic narratives, in their explicit concern with the formal dimensions of suffering and response, may offer alternatives to the identity-based structures of humanitarianism in order to “generate new discursive formations and cultural contexts through which human rights becomes a site of possibility and contestation.”122 Do representations of humanitarian spaces and subjects only produce victims, or victims and agents? Or can texts that originated in MSF’s shared commitment to medical treatment and justice, but are not bound by specific outcomes, reveal a wider spectrum of humanitarian subjectivities? I have tried to identify moments when these texts, each in its own register, reveal the workings of the humanitarian spaces from which they sprang, and in doing so construe the heterogeneity of subjects who inhabit those spaces. As opposed to victims or survivors, or other static subject positions that readily become coded in categories of identity, I focus on the gestures, social meanings, and everyday practices that construe not just the bare conditions of physical existence (or not), but the expressions of what is animating and at once immanent and shared. Those representations of vitality and social viability—a mother stretching her hands over her sick children, the continued meaning of the rituals of mourning during severe famine, the demand by vulnerable subjects that someone witness their suffering and their loss— do not conjure the liberal subject of human rights. In fact, they resist the teleology of the progress narrative that would chart the transformation of victims into survivors and then agents. And they resist the juridicalization of political engagement in which human rights would eclipse all other struggles for justice. Instead they make visible a wide spectrum of social life and political subjectivization, and they demonstrate, as Weizman argues, that “[a]s long as refugees are alive, the potential for political transformation still exists.”123 This emphasis on potentiality maintains the radical openness of the future and of the subjects who would claim it.

Notes 1. Norwegian Nobel Committee, “The Nobel Peace Prize 1999.” 2. MSF International is the umbrella organization for twenty-three national MSF associations, each of which is attached to one of the five operational directorates. Sharing a commitment to MSF’s founding charter and principles as well as representation within MSF International, the associations are nevertheless independent legal entities with autonomy in choosing and directing their

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194 Re-purposing Témoignage missions. Here I refer to MSF in general terms when discussing the organization’s ethos. The missions documented in the photo/graphic narratives include the work of multiple MSF associations. 3. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 6. 4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 127. 5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 133–34. 6. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 134. 7. Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood, 33. 8. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, 184. 9. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 188. 10. Wilson and Brown, “Introduction,” Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, 9. 11. Wilson and Brown, “Introduction,” 8. 12. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” 203. 13. Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative,” 39. 14. Fassin, “Heart of Humaneness: The Moral Economy of Humanitarian Intervention,” 274. 15. Orbinski, An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the Twenty-First Century, 69. 16. Orbinski, “Médecins Sans Frontières—Nobel Lecture.” 17. Redfield, “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis,” 344, 345. 18. Redfield, “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis,” 345. 19. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, 4. 20. Orbinski, “Nobel Lecture.” 21. Redfield, “Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis,” 347. 22. Médecins Sans Frontières, “Advocacy and Témoignage.” 23. MSF, “MSF Charter and Principles.” 24. MSF, “About Us.” 25. Redfield, “A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement,” 6. 26. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 41. 27. Brauman, “The Médecins Sans Frontières experience,” 218. Quoted in DeChaine, “Humanitarian Space and the Social Imaginary: Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders and the Rhetoric of Global Community,” 367. 28. Redfield, “A Less Modest Witness,” 8. 29. R2P, 2001. In an MSF position paper on R2P, Fabrice Weissman has cited the organization’s 1994 call for military action as “an exception that proves the rule,” while restating MSF’s belief that “legalizing [R2P] would effectively be legalizing a new form of imperialism” (Weissman 2010). 30. Quoted in Redfield, “A Less Modest Witness,” 8. 31. Quoted in Redfield, “A Less Modest Witness,” 9. 32. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 47. Redfield notes that MSF has been willing to share evidence that it alone possessed as well as to provide medical certificates that patients could use as legal evidence of their conditions (Life in Crisis, 105).

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Re-purposing Témoignage  195 33. Weissman, “Silence Heals … From the Cold War to the War on Terror, MSF Speaks Out: A Brief History,” 178. 34. Davey, “Famine, Aid, and Ideology: The Political Activism of Médecins sans Frontières in the 1980s,” 532. 35. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, 9, 8. 36. Redfield, Life in Crisis, 110. 37. Redfield, Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders, 107. 38. Redfield, Life in Crisis, 100. 39. Redfield, Life in Crisis, 162–63. 40. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 57. 41. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 29, 44. 42. As Eleanor Davey has discussed, “sans-frontiérisme is characterized by the use of the media, in an activist strategy dubbed the ‘loi du tapage,’ or the law of hype, by MSF founding member Bernard Kouchner” (Davey, “Famine, Aid, and Ideology: The Political Activism of Médecins sans Frontières in the 1980s,” 531). 43. Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism, 17. 44. Chouliaraki, “Post-Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Communication beyond a Politics of Pity,” 109. 45. Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror, 141, 221. 46. Chouliaraki, “‘Improper Distance: Towards a Critical Account of Solidarity as Irony,’” 364. 47. Chouliaraki, “‘Improper Distance,’” 364. 48. Chouliaraki, “‘Improper Distance,’” 373. 49. Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh, xvi. 50. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 195. 51. Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, 93, 23. 52. Chouliaraki, “‘Improper Distance,’” 363. 53. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, 3, 156–73. 54. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 29. 55. Redfield, Life in Crisis, 106. 56. Ritchin, “Introduction: Twenty Years Ago, and Later,” in Salgado, Sahel: The End of the Road, 4. 57. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 29. 58. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, 86. 59. Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? 83. 60. Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, 68. 61. Strauss, “Epiphany of the Other,” 99. 62. Levinas, L’Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpelier: Fata Morgana, 1972), n.p., cited in Strauss, “The Epiphany of the Other,” 99. 63. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 50. 64. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 50. 65. Ritchin, “Introduction: Twenty Years Ago, and Later,” 6. 66. Puleo quotes Salgado’s frequent claim, “I’m not showing these pictures to make anyone feel guilty, but to provoke a discussion” (“The Prophetic Act of Bearing Witness: The Work of Sebastião Salgado”).

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196 Re-purposing Témoignage 67. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, 50. 68. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, 77–78. 69. Salgado, Sahel: The End of the Road, 125. 70. Salgado, Sahel: The End of the Road, 129. 71. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, 87. 72. Strauss, “Epiphany of the Other,” 96. 73. Weissman, “Silence Heals,” 182. 74. Cubilié, 76. 75. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 115. 76. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, 129. 77. Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” 457. 78. Chute, Graphic Women, 8. 79. Chute, Graphic Women, 5. 80. Chute, Graphic Women, 7. 81. For a discussion of this aspect of braiding, see Groensteen, The System of Comics, 147. 82. Guibert, et al. The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders, 219. 83. Guibert, The Photographer, 168. 84. Fassin, “Inequalities of Lives, Hierarchies of Humanity: Moral Commitments and Ethical Dilemmas of Humanitarianism,” 239. 85. Fassin, “Inequalities of Lives, Hierarchies of Humanity,” 255. 86. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, 3. 87. Guibert, The Photographer, 132. 88. Guibert, The Photographer, 135. 89. Guibert, The Photographer, 136. 90. Fassin, “Inequalities of Lives, Hierarchies of Humanity,” 248. 91. Guibert, The Photographer, 155. 92. Guibert, The Photographer, 154. 93. Hedges, “What War Looks Like.” 94. Chute, Graphic Women, 182. 95. Hedges, “What War Looks Like.” 96. MSF, Life, Death and Aid: The Médecins Sans Frontières Report on World Crisis Intervention, 29. 97. MSF’s mission in Democratic Republic of Congo is also described in Marc Le Pape’s “Victims of No Importance,” in In the Shadow of ‘Just Wars’: Violence, Politics and Humanitarian Action, edited by Fabrice Weissman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press and MSF, 2004). 98. Haviv et al., Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of Congo. 99. Walker, “How NGOs Work with Photographers: Doctors Without Borders.” 100. Walker, “How NGOs Work with Photographers: Doctors Without Borders.” 101. Torrenté in Haviv, Forgotten War. 102. Redfield, “The Verge of Crisis: Doctors Without Borders in Uganda,” 174. 1 03. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, 87. 04. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 57. 1 1 05. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 70. 1 06. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 17. 1 07. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 33.

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Re-purposing Témoignage  197 108. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 33. 109. MSF, “Activity Report 2005/2006,” 60. 110. Terry, “Myanmar: ‘Golfing with the Generals,’” 116. 111. Terry, “Myanmar: ‘Golfing with the Generals,’” 20. 112. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 52. 113. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 159. 114. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 91. 115. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 233. 116. Delisle, Burma Chronicles, 260. 117. DeChaine, “Humanitarian Space and the Social Imaginary,” 356, 359. 118. Fassin, “Inequalities of Lives, Hierarchies of Humanity,” 240. For further discussion of how these differences impact MSF decision-making, see Magone et al. (2011), Fassin (2007), and Shevchenko and Fox (2008). The “politics of life” also figure in Reed’s Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma (2007). 119. Rieff, “Afterword,” Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, 255. 120. Marie-Pierre Allié, quoted in Rieff, “Afterword,” 256. 121. Chute, Graphic Women, 9. 122. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 24, 196. 123. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 61.

5 In the Aftermath of Mass Murder

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Visuality and Vertigo in the Indonesia Films of Joshua Oppenheimer

Politics occurs only when political subjects initiate a quarrel over the perceptible givens of common life. Jacques Rancière And they start staging themselves in ways that reveal how they imagine themselves. Joshua Oppenheimer

In an extraordinary essay about how poetry written out of the experience of atrocity bears witness to that experience, Carolyn Forché describes the aftermath of atrocity as “a temporal debris field […] where that-which-­happened remains present, including the consciousness in which such events arose and transpired.”1 That consciousness of atrocity can take many forms, from the psychic and physical scars survivors bear to the political effects that atrocity produced. Forché details how the poet’s use of language that had itself “passed through” atrocity functions in two ways to convey its consciousness. First, the language is evidentiary rather than representational, bearing not just a recounting of experience, but also its ongoing presence, into the poem. Language “bears wounds,” she writes, “legible in line-breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech.”2 Second, it calls out to the reader to enjoin the work of witnessing that the poem undertakes. The poem itself becomes witness to atrocity as much through the poet’s formal choices as her subject matter, initiating a process of witnessing that can only be completed through the reader’s engagement. This process does not reconfirm a fixed consciousness that previously existed, in an ahistorical return, but reflects the creative negotiation of atrocity and its aftermaths across different sites of meaning. Forché’s definition of the aftermath of atrocity as more than simply what comes “after” it, as instead a dense temporal field where past and present converge, characterizes many post conflict scenarios, and has particular resonance in sites where impunity for atrocity continues to shape contemporary lives. Contemporary Indonesia, where filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has worked to illuminate the ongoing and contemporary effects of the 1965–66 mass murders that brought former President Suharto’s New Order government to power, is one such example.

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  199 With a largely Indonesian film crew who still maintain a protective anonymity, Oppenheimer spent a decade filming survivors and perpetrators of the murder campaign against hundreds of thousands of Indonesians accused of being communists, including Communist Party members, ethnic Chinese, students, unionists, and landless farmers. The death toll is estimated at 500,000 to 1.5 million people (although some put the number as high as two million dead), in addition to one million people imprisoned, many without trial3; and the discrepancy between these figures provides just one indication of the lack of accounting—enumerating, verifying, reckoning, answering for—that has occurred within Indonesia and among its allies (including the US government). Throughout Suharto’s thirty-threeyear rule, and even since his removal from office in 1998, the mass murders, although not celebrated, have been scripted as essential to a strong, sovereign, Indonesian national identity and its neoliberal policies. Survivors and their families are thus subject to an ongoing fear, as they live in the knowledge that their precaritization is a necessary component of the government’s self-­legitimization. Precaritization of certain segments of the population has become normalized in order to enable what Isabell Lorey terms “governing through insecurity”4: the manipulation of rhetoric of endangerment to rationalize the state’s military securitization against designated internal threats. With a keen sense of the individual and political costs of living in the aftermath, where perpetrators flourish with impunity and survivors persist in fear among them, Oppenheimer made two films: the first, The Act of Killing5 or Jagal (2012; co-directed by Anonymous and Christine Cynn), portrays three perpetrators—Anwar Congo, Herman Koto, and Adi Zulkadry—from North Sumatra who accept Oppenheimer’s invitation to re-dramatize their atrocities in the cinematic styles of the movies they love; and the second, The Look of Silence or Senyap (2014), focuses on a survivor, Adi Rukun, who confronts the perpetrators of his brother, Ramli’s, torture and murder in hopes of finding a way to escape the fear which has crippled his family for almost fifty years and, just possibly, to create a community capable of “co-flourishing” for the future.6 This chapter presses on Forché’s theorization of witnessing in the aftermath in order to analyze how Oppenheimer’s films construct and construe a visual field through which the political subjectivization of those readily sacrificed in the name of national security might take place. Whereas Forché emphasizes the ethico-aesthetic work of witness poetry, I consider how Oppenheimer’s films challenge familiar formal categories and, in doing so, re-shape political as well as aesthetic terrain—the social imaginary and political discourse of the purge and the generic conventions of documentary film. This shift in the contours of Forché’s argument is made possible in part by the shift in media. According to Jacques Rancière, literature provides a “means of constructing the very world in which stories can occur, events link with one another in sequence, appearances arise.”7 In his view, film works differently and contradictorily: “one [feature] is intensification

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200  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder of the visual aspect of the word, of the bodies that carry it and the things they speak of; the other is intensification of the visible as something that disclaims the word or shows the absence of what it speaks of.”8 These powers of intensification illuminate the tension between what film shows (and does not show) and how it shows, both of which only have meaning in reference to a shared and dynamic social imaginary. Among the six functions Rancière identifies for film is as “an ideological apparatus producing images that circulate in society and in which society recognizes its modern stereotypes.” These images, however, are never entirely beholden to the ideological apparatus from which they arise because of the tensions between content and form, presence and absence, as well as film’s deep affective capacity. The affects it generates are themselves mutable, leaving “the residue of those presences that accumulate and settle in us as their reality fades and alters over time.”9 Film potentially plays a crucial role, in other words, in visualizing the social imaginary across temporalities, but also in drawing attention to the slippages among its images, their construction, and their effects in the “temporal debris field” that Forché describes. Nicholas Mirzoeff rightly insists on the need to locate Rancière’s approach in historical context in order to demonstrate how a political terrain is constituted, subject to scrutiny, and available for “countervisual” interpretation, rather than to assert an abstraction about art and politics. Mirzoeff explains visuality as “discursive practice that has material effects” and is located in the work of social imagination, as opposed to any individual perception. Visuality provides an optic that corresponds to and confirms the perspective of authority. Locating his study of visuality in the context of European colonialism and US (neo)imperialism, he understands visuality’s operations to include the constitution and aestheticization of distinct social groups, operations that objectify persons according to identity categories and simultaneously delimit their political agency. Visuality and the visualizations it produced “supplemented the violence of authority and its separations, forming a complex that came to seem natural by virtue of its investment in ‘history.’”10 Visuality enhances the work of governmentality by naturalizing its operations according to visual schema of recognizable categories of the disenfranchised. To interrupt the power of visuality and visualization to define the terms of the social imaginary within which embodied existence takes place, Mirzoeff develops a theory of countervisuality as the “dissensus within visuality” that he terms “the right to look.”11 Countervisuality is not wholly distinct from but is instead bound up with visuality, continually impinging on its panoptical illusions. Most importantly, countervisuality’s assertion of the right to look denotes the political subjectivity that attends it, and thus, contra Agamben, insists that “bare life itself is political.”12 I argue in this chapter that Oppenheimer’s films attempt to shift the mode of visuality of Indonesia’s state-sponsored mass murders and, thus, the foundations of the government’s political legitimacy, by creating conditions in which the political subjectivity of survivors and victims’ families

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  201 can emerge. To do so, each film distinctly renders the operations of visuality that work to secure political power and each exploits the slippages between those operations and their material, political, and affective products. Forché describes how poetry of witness conveys consciousness of the nonlinear, recursive, longue durée of an event from the inside of experience, through language that bears its marks. In contradistinction to Forché’s model, the films—made by an American-Indonesian-Danish team from outside the experience of atrocity but during its aftermath—do not so much witness that which has occurred and bring it into the present as engage the operations of visuality that sustain authoritarian power, privilege and impunity. Rather than a documentary approach that exposes atrocity, engaged witnessing in Oppenheimer’s films is performative in its creation of the visual field of which it speaks and which it represents. Moreover, as opposed to the previous chapters’ focus on the interplay of aesthetic and normative human rights discourses, in this chapter I read Oppenheimer’s Indonesia films in relation to official silence—a silence that not only protects those who gained power as a result of the 1965–66 political genocide,13 but also masks the role of allies, including the US, in Suharto’s violent rise to power and decades-long rule. In response to a pervasive culture of impunity, the director formulated a filmmaking process in The Act of Killing to understand “the imaginative procedures by which human beings persecute each other, and how we then go on to build (and live in) societies founded on systemic and enduring violence.”14 In the film, Oppenheimer took perpetrators up on their seemingly enthusiastic willingness to dramatize their actions and invited them to write, direct, and act in their own film (with the assistance of both Oppenheimer’s film crew and one provided by the state) about their roles during the genocide, while Oppenheimer would simultaneously film and facilitate their process. Oppenheimer’s non-fiction film, then, is a cinematic narrative that contains scenes of making the perpetrator’s film within it, and viewers continually confront the difference between the perpetrators’ and Oppenheimer’s storytelling, as well as between their stories. By engaging perpetrators’ performance of the operations of visuality, The Act of Killing denaturalizes those operations and renders visuality at once phantasmatic and, in its effects, all too real. By re-enacting the roles they imagine and then re-viewing those roles through the lens Oppenheimer provides (a process mirrored by viewers of the film who watch the three character-subjects screening their scenes), lead characters Anwar, Adi, and Herman face fractures in ideological coherence caused by the forty-year interval from the original events, perhaps by their own consciences, and certainly by the self-alienating effects of seeing themselves through the eyes of the filmmaker or a spectator. These fractures manifest in the cinematic fantasies the men construct, as well as in the larger frame of Oppenheimer’s film, producing vertigo among both the actors as well as the film’s viewers, albeit for different reasons.

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202  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder Mirzoeff points out that the “ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal,’ or everyday, because it is always already contested.”15 By staging the performative compulsion of the operations of visuality, their necessary iterability becomes at once paramount and increasingly fraught. Each performance attempts to extend prevailing norms into a new present; however each performance also carries with it the possibility of miscue, unintelligibility, or other failures that reveal cracks in visuality’s ideological foundations. These cracks manifest in the shifts of the camera’s gaze that always seeks to ratify the performance at hand, but does not always succeed, in part because the gaze is constantly revealed to be partial, contingent, and changing. The authority behind each performance is similarly unstable, also shifting continuously amongt the film’s character-subjects and between them and the director. Finally, The Act of Killing makes visible multiple meanings of performativity, in addition to performativity as an attempt to reassert particular positions tied to sovereign subjectivity. Performativity also describes the film’s production of affect and of spectacle, its heterotemporal irruptions, its political engagement, and, as the film’s title suggests, its meditation on what the performance of atrocity reveals about the stage upon which it occurs. By layering these forms of performativity in phantasmatic and realist aesthetic registers, the film generates among both participants and viewers a sense of vertigo that undermines the stable authority of visuality. Whereas vertigo in The Act of Killing ultimately discloses the failure of sovereign subjectivity through the revelation of the performativity (as opposed to naturalization) of specific identities in which authority is recognizable, vertigo in The Look of Silence emerges from the film’s layered, often harrowing renderings of vulnerability and precarity. These include the vulnerabilities of embodied existence, social relations, and biopolitical governance (the three forms of precariousness that Lorey defines) as well as its protagonist, Adi Rukun’s radical self-precaritization in his confrontations with perpetrators of his brother’s murder. Although select scenes in The Look of Silence were filmed prior to The Act of Killing, when Oppenheimer was conducting the interviews with perpetrators that included Anwar Congo, The Act of Killing had been completed but not released when Adi Rukun asked Oppenheimer to engage the second project. Adi made this request after screening many of Oppenheimer’s earlier interviews, including ones with perpetrators of his brother’s prolonged mutilations and brutal murder. Perpetrators who knew of the first film, and, therefore, of Oppenheimer’s links with national leaders of the genocidal campaigns, were willing to be filmed with Adi, who often came with his optician equipment and offered free eye exams and services as an entry into conversation. Carrying the ethical, affective, and political weight of the film, Adi’s performances are dramatic in both their cinematic effects and their staging of his own claim to political subjectivity in relation to those who would deny or simply refuse to recognize it.

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  203 If, as Marianne Constable has recently argued, legal speech acts should be considered discursively, rather than as a set of rules, in order to understand how they provide shared, evolving conceptual norms of social life, then the absence of any juridico-political response to the genocide functions as an elision where there should be a shared lexicon, grammar, perhaps genre, and occasion for speaking. Playing on the synesthesia of its title, The Look of Silence enters that discursive space. In the absence of available language with which survivors can speak of the genocide, the film insists on the presence of a claim to the right to look that is also the right to speak. As the layering of perceptual faculties suggests, these claims are grounded in embodied, social, and political life. By ignoring the tacit injunction on representing the mass murders, Adi and Oppenheimer’s overlapping yet distinct projects initiate an affective, visual, and verbal discourse to bring survivors, bystanders, perpetrators, and viewers into difficult conversation. That conversation is predicated on the representation of embodied and embedded vulnerability not of those who died, but of those who persist, together. The Act of Killing suggests that fantasy can unmoor a given visualization from its hold on the real and thereby make possible an ethico-political project for the future. The Look of Silence tries to imagine a form for that project in the absence of normative human rights or publicly acknowledged discourses of guilt, victimhood, or vulnerability. The film does so by staging confrontations that dramatize how Adi’s emergence as a political subject disturbs the status quo. In Rancière’s terms, The Look of Silence creates the “demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he or she ‘normally’ has no reason to see or hear.”16 The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence work distinctly yet collaboratively to generate a “quarrel over the perceptible givens of common life,”17 to echo an epigraph for this chapter, within which a prevailing mode of visuality fails and an alternative might be imagined and claimed.

Historical and Cinematic Contexts of Visuality The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence grew out of the Oppenheimer’s extensive work with a community of survivors of the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia. Initially commissioned by the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers to make what became The Globalization Tapes (2002) with a group of oil palm plantation workers who wanted to unionize, Oppenheimer came to realize that survivors and victims’ families from the murder campaign still lived in fear among the perpetrators. Perpetrators, in turn, seemed to bear no shame, guilt, or punishment for the atrocities they committed and, indeed, continued to wield power to suppress contemporary unionization efforts. Deploying the fear of a reprised campaign of violence, those in power continued to cement their privilege decades after the violence

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204  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder that brought Suharto to power and even after protests against his administration’s corruption and nepotism, combined with political pressure from the US, brought his rule to an end. The 1965–66 episode in Indonesian history, perhaps most familiar to US film viewers through The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) with Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt (as Billy Kwan), ignited when disaffected junior military officers staged a failed coup by assassinating six army generals. Although the regime of the anti-colonial and independence hero Sukarno was not in serious jeopardy, the threat provided a rationale for a purge of “leftists” as well as the transfer of presidential powers to General Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for the ensuing thirty-three years.18 The “pretext for mass murder,” in historian John Roosa’s words, emerged from a struggle within the Indonesian armed forces for political power in the face of President Sukarno’s failing health and his alliance with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). After the coup attempt, Army General Suharto declared his intention to “restore order.” He centralized power in the military (after purging it of those connected to the PKI) and orchestrated a campaign with both tacit and active US support to decimate what was then the world’s largest non-bloc Communist party, thereby denying Sukarno one of his main constituencies. Suharto completed this transfer of power in 1967 when he assumed the presidency, inaugurating thirty-one more years of New Order government as well as a lasting culture of impunity for the perpetrators and beneficiaries of the mass murder and intimidation campaign. Although the failed coup was less a threat to the security of the nation than an excuse for its military securitization, “[t]he claim that the PKI organized the movement was, for the Suharto regime, not any ordinary fact; it was the supreme fact of history from which the very legitimacy of the regime was derived.”19 That this “supreme fact” was fiction did not limit its catalytic force in dictating the operations of visuality that secured Suharto’s rule. Three aspects of this brief history have crucial bearing on Oppenheimer’s films and the operations of visuality they disclose. First, not only have the crimes of political genocide, mass murder, political intimidation, and imprisonment without trial never been prosecuted within Indonesia, but the perpetrators are also recognized locally as protectors of the state by a ruling class that has maintained the rhetoric of anti-Communism to legitimate its own power. Even on a national level, where official discourse has been less overtly celebratory and more euphemistic, the rhetoric of “freedom and insecurity form the new couple of neoliberal governmentality,” as Lorey accurately describes.20 The mobilization of fear insists on the continued urgency of this visualization of national strength and security. Oppenheimer discovered in filming survivors and perpetrators that, for the latter, “words that would have genocidal connotations—[kill, stab,] exterminate—had heroic connotations”21; whereas survivors and bystanders, as one Indonesian commentator writes, had “tacitly come to accept human rights abuses as the implicit political price for unity and the rule of the mob as an ugly but ordinary part of

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  205 life.”22 Oppenheimer attributes these strategies to the internalization of state terror and a “colossal failure of the imagination,” which Suharto engineered through media control and the manipulation of anti-Communism into “the state religion, complete with sacred sites, rituals, and dates.”23 Second, in keeping with Cold War alliances, post-Vietnam fears of Communist incursions, and neo-liberal economic policies, the US supported Suharto’s long regime, and Oppenheimer and his film crew were initially presumed to be contemporary allies by those living with impunity. This presumption is understandable, given the history of US-Indonesia relations. Bradley R. Simpson demonstrates, for example, that even during the administration of US President Jimmy Carter, which championed rights rhetoric, human rights violations were narrowly defined and subject to trade for economic and military alliances. Simpson illustrates how, in concert with the rise of Amnesty International and its focus on prisoners of conscience, “political prisoners and torture bec[a]me the lingua franca of human rights politics” for both Indonesian and international human rights groups. Although US political pressure led to the release of 30,000 political prisoners, that release came at the expense of other human rights campaigns, including efforts in response to the mass murders of 1965–66 as well as to Indonesia’s invasion of and atrocities within East Timor beginning in 1975.24 In presuming that Oppenheimer shared their perspective, perpetrators in The Act of Killing also presumed that their performances for the camera would inevitably re-authorize authority, as Mirzoeff describes. For the street-level perpetrators who carried out the state’s violence yet only partially reaped its rewards, participation in The Act of Killing seemed to promise a vehicle to solidify and burnish their reputations. It would allow them to glorify actions that they were willing to believe were essential, yet which had been insufficiently commended nationally.25 The film’s focal point, Anwar Congo, initially envisions a “beautiful family movie” of his “heroic memories” that would feature humor and “wonderful scenery.” Screening his work, Anwar adds that, “It really shows what’s special about our country.” Moreover, Anwar anticipates that the performative reproduction of visuality, his re-dramatization of atrocity as a movie star, will transform him from authority’s instrument to its hero; thus he can state, “I’m now projecting myself into history on a bigger scale than I have before.”26 “Projecting” in this statement references film’s crucial role in the production of the social imaginary, as well as Anwar’s individual desire to distribute a heroic view of himself to a larger audience—and, more specifically, to be recognized as an historical agent. In psychoanalytic terms, projection has another meaning, however, that intimates the fissures to come in his sense of himself. For Freud, projection is a defensive operation that attributes “to another (person or thing) […] qualities, feelings or wishes that the subject repudiates or refuses to recognise in himself.”27 When Anwar and his friends and associates spectacularize their actions as well as play the role of victims, these complex operations of projection come to the surface and disturb the

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206  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder ideological consistency of their initial visions. The Look of Silence is similarly made possible by perpetrators’ familiarity with Oppenheimer from The Act of Killing and because governing officials whose power is rooted in those founding atrocities cooperated with the making of that earlier film. In addition, Oppenheimer and his crew’s presence offers some measure of personal protection for Adi as he asks neighbors, relatives, and local officials about their roles during the genocide. Third, in Medan, North Sumatra, where The Act of Killing takes place, the government had and has a particularly close relationship with the gangster and paramilitary organizations that conducted the army-directed atrocities and remain tacitly employed to enforce political control over an unusually diverse population.28 The un-ironic alliance between the government and gangsters or preman is couched in neoliberal rhetoric of freedom and entrepreneurial subjectivity, both of which are instrumentalized by the security state. Building upon Foucault’s work, Erinn Gilson defines two key features of entrepreneurial subjectivity: its aversion to vulnerability, “regarding it not just as a condition to avoid but also as a bad character trait to possess,” and, correspondingly, its belief that responsibility for risk should be privatized.29 In a context of 1965 Indonesia, Suharto’s bid for power in the name of national security against the ostensible threat of Communists mobilized fear alongside the rhetoric of the spontaneous uprisings of the populace against those that threatened the state. Violence that was manufactured by the state was instead attributed to the entrepreneurial, sovereign subject who distributes “injurability onto an other by doing violence to that other in order to secure its own impermeability, invulnerability, and defense against violence.”30 Through the doubling of persecution and sovereignty—in which the threat of persecution provides a rationale for violence whose effects, in turn, confirm the deserved injurability of an other—the entrepreneurial subject valorized by the state can maintain a cycle of violent privilege in the name of both the subject and the state’s defense. Entrepreneurial subjects in the film—e.g., the newspaper publisher, land developer, leader of the ­Pancasila Youth—clearly reap the rewards of the neoliberal policies of the state that they helped to advance. The Act of Killing demonstrates how entrepreneurial subjectivity lies at the heart of what Paul Amar terms the logic of paramilitary securitization, which “enforces territorially anchored and highly masculinist notions of security that proliferate in the context of deregulated, privatized, or entrepreneurial coercive interventions.”31 For instance, the film lingers at a rally of the Pancasila Youth, a paramilitary organization with three million members, where its leaders celebrate their combined roles as preman and “free men.” Claiming the state of exception for themselves and in the nation’s interests, the Pancasila leaders publicly proclaim themselves outside the law and not subject to its limitations, even though they remain protected by it. This condition of at once exemption and protection is manifest as the rally’s special guest, the vice president of Indonesia, receives an honorary

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  207 uniform and a raucous reception when he tells the crowd that the government “need[s] gangsters to get things done.” That the discourse of privatized security and individual freedom is directed toward capital accumulation and the consolidation of different social classes as opposed to broadly shared social and economic rights is made clear in the many sequences of both paramilitaries and elites at the golf club or in lavish offices or homes. In one memorable scene in The Act of Killing, a local businessman proudly displays his crystal figurine collection for the camera. It is a documentary moment; however, the disjunctions between this life of rare privilege and the atrocities upon which it is founded transform the real into the surreal. The alliance between the paramilitaries and gangsters and the government echoes in other scenes that link past and present, such as the complicity of local journalists in justifying the genocide, contemporary shakedowns of ethnic Chinese merchants, and Herman Koto’s bald attempts to buy votes in an upcoming election in hopes of securing for himself a steady source of graft. At the same time, The Act of Killing in particular underscores the separation between the street-level gangsters and paramilitaries who enforce a regime built upon fear and the political office holders and business elites who benefit most from that regime. These three features—the lasting impunity of direct perpetrators and their superiors, the perception of continued American support for the murder campaign, and the privatization of the violence that sustains authority in conjunction with the unequal distribution of its rewards—shape the contours of both films by defining a political problem and how the filmmakers gained access to it. The countervisual work of the films, then, depends on the specific codes of visuality that connect these different features. Linking the flamboyant fantasy of The Act of Killing and the quiet realism of The Look of Silence is the propaganda that undergirded the New Order government. One of its recurring elements is the film The Treachery of the S­ eptember 30th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party, or Pengkhianatan G30S PKI (G30S), which, Oppenheimer has written, “marks the generic imperatives, stylistic tendencies and performative routines and effects of New Order history.”32 The four-hour film was mandatory viewing for Indonesians every September 30th from 1984 to 1998, and it annually re-­certified Suharto’s claim to power in the name of national security. G30S’s gory depiction of the failed coup attempt consistently reminded viewers of the ongoing need for Suharto’s emergency decree of 3 October 1965 to restore order, and it prohibited questioning the mass murders undertaken at the same time. In a style Oppenheimer and Michael Uwemedimo have described as a “curious blend of documentary exposé, political thriller, and slasher movie,” the film climaxed in “the graphic murder of the six generals at the hands of a communist mob, their genitals mutilated in a sadomasochistic orgy perpetrated by members of the PKI-affiliated Gerwani (Women’s Movement), burnt with cigarettes, slashed with razor blades, stabbed with bayonets, beaten with rifle butts,

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208  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder all to the accompaniment of wild chanting and drums.”33 This depiction of a feminized, unruly, violent, sadistic, and sexualized threat provided an enemy against which the hyper-masculine, entrepreneurial and securitized subject must prevail. As the description of its aesthetics makes clear, G30S’s visual codes represent Suharto’s New Order authority in binary gendered terms. These codes “presuppose[e] a mind/body dualism” in the “pursuit of invulnerability,” in Gilson’s words,34 such that the hyper-masculine control by the entrepreneurial subject appears necessary to contain the embodied excess of leftist, feminized perversion. Although G30S does not of course provide the complete visualization of the past that sustains the present, the film and its fifteen-year run raise key questions about how Oppenheimer engages visuality in order to subvert it. To begin, given that the power of G30S is rooted in its historical inaccuracy, how do The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence make the past available for scrutiny? Both films have been critiqued for their failure to link the violence that initiated Suharto’s political rule to Indonesia’s history of colonization and decolonization, Sukarno’s role as independence leader, as well as the international corporate influence over key industries. Aside from a brief mention of “direct aid of western governments” in a historical paragraph about 1965–66 that opens the film, The Act of Killing reports neither American characterization of the murder campaign as a necessary evil in the fight against Communism nor decades of American support for Suharto’s government, which included supplying names of 5,000 suspected Communists during the murder campaign as well as the Carter administration’s suppression of human rights reporting on Indonesia’s atrocities in East Timor a decade later.35 Although the film does not address US complicity directly, viewers are prompted to question Oppenheimer’s access to perpetrators, particularly when that access takes place against the backdrop of scenes of private accumulation, such as in the shopping mall, the private museum of dead animals, or one man’s crystal collection. With the exception of one short sequence of a NBC report in The Look of Silence that clearly demonstrates US political and corporate complicity (in footage of the use of forced labor in a Goodyear plant and an appallingly blasé exchange about the murder of “communists”), the films eschew historical footage and the talking heads who would typically provide larger context concerning Indonesia’s Dutch colonial past, the role of US and other international oil and rubber interests, and US political support for the massacres, asking instead for viewers to understand more broadly the violence upon which the growth of neoliberalism and the security state is predicated and sustained. Jill Godmilow, among others, has criticized The Act of Killing for its failure to “educate” viewers, writing forcefully, “Don’t Make History without Facts.”36 Within her larger argument about how the film constructs Indonesians for a western audience, using spectacle to produce Indonesians as other and, ultimately, as entertainment, Godmilow’s critique depends upon understanding the function of documentary film to cultivate

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  209 and educate particular audiences and, in doing so, to keep the public and private worlds of the perpetrators rigorously separated. Of the perpetrators’ admission of their crimes before the camera, she writes that “Confessions are private matters unless part of a reconciliation process.”37 Oppenheimer arguably understands both his audience (Indonesian and international) and the role of “non-fictional” film38 in relation to normative human rights processes differently, whereby the film’s narrative and aesthetic elements purposefully transgress the boundaries between public and private in order to question the interests that are served by that boundary. The Act of Killing’s evidentiary function, to return to Forché’s formulation of it, is not juridical but rather manifests in its proliferation of performances around the mass murders. These performances destabilize the boundary between public and private that should sustain sovereign subjectivity by rationalizing atrocity as a legitimate function of governmentality, while they simultaneously draw attention to their own constructions. The film, therefore, reveals how performativity potentially loosens the layers of ideology that are knotted, according to Kaja Silverman, by the libidinal investments in the “reservoir of sounds, images, and narratives” that works alongside the law to maintain the political order.39 The separation of the juridical and political orders in this case also underscores that not all politics need to be juridical to be effective, and that human rights remain just one approach to justice. The question of genre here is crucial both to how Oppenheimer’s films are understood and to the tropes around which they are organized. In terms of their own categorization, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence reformulate the familiar components of documentary film—archival historical material, the interview, and the historical re-creation—in order to blow open its generic conventions and to emphasize the heterotemporality of atrocity that still bears on the present rather than the exposure of the past. In place of an investigation into the archives, in The Act of Killing Oppenheimer reveals the political offices that beneficiaries of the genocide still hold and the benefits they accrue. And in place of the filmmaker’s interviews with an array of experts and survivors, The Look of Silence creates the conditions for Adi Rukun’s confrontations with the perpetrators in which he slowly reveals himself as a survivor. These interviews are not fact-finding missions grounded in professionalized knowledge and expertise; instead they provide the foundation for a socio-political relationship to take place, and then they document its process. And as opposed to historical re-­ creation, Oppenheimer describes the perpetrators’ dramatic re-imagination of their crimes in The Act of Killing, for instance, as “counter-performances” that, in attempting to rehearse New Order historiography of the purge as the spontaneous uprising of the people against Communism, unwittingly betray that historiography as scripted and performative.40 In each of these ways, the films deploy visual intensity to denaturalize the surface upon which intensification takes place, revealing

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210  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder the layers of performativity and vulnerability beneath it. His cinematic language seems to have “passed through” atrocity in Forché’s terms in that it is creating what it witnesses: the composition of arresting images, whose layered meanings trouble easy divisions between past and present and what is imagined and real; long, slow shots to convey the haunting presence of the dead and of the survivors’ suffering; careful soundtracks that often provide a counternarrative to the perpetrators’ perspectives; and, the framing of perpetrators’ vertiginous imaginations. Both films have received extensive critical acclaim, although The Act of Killing in particular ignited global media attention and debate over its attention to perpetrators as opposed to victims and survivors, its often phantasmagorical images, and its intervention into Indonesian political discourse. An Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature increased attention to the film and the stakes of its portrayal of mass murderers as somehow at once bizarre and ordinary, with film critic Nick Fraser calling it a “snuff movie” in The Guardian (London) while others praised it effusively.41 Kenneth Turan, for example, described The Act of Killing in the Los Angeles Times as “A mind-bending film, devastating and disorienting, that disturbs us in ways we’re not used to being disturbed, raising questions about the nature of documentary, the persistence of evil, and the intertwined ways movies function in our culture and in our minds.”42 The Look of Silence is a quieter, though still deeply disturbing film that has been admired for its elegant aesthetic and moral force in charting Adi’s confrontations with perpetrators who still hold power. Although critics note that the film works more conventionally than The Act of Killing to allow viewers’ identification with its survivor protagonist, that identification fails to secure the normative human rights narrative of atrocity, suffering, testimony, and redress. Indeed, Adi’s confrontations are not part of a larger human rights campaign; rather the film provides a context in which Adi can stage a personal and political claim in the void of a larger effort. John Roosa has written powerfully that “[e]ach mass grave in the archipelago marks an arbitrary, unavowed, secretive exercise of state power and mocks the Suharto-era social imaginary in which only civilians commit atrocities and only the military holds the country together.”43 The remainder of this chapter examines how Oppenheimer’s films probe the operations of this social imaginary and the political power it authorizes. Demonstrating that “in order to make invisible stories visible, you also have to make the storytelling process visible,”44 Oppenheimer dramatizes the problematics of storytelling through the portrayal of performativity and its vertiginous effects. In The Act of Killing, performativity that seeks to sustain the visual field produces a contradictory array of affects, identifications, and projections that undermine its coherence and that of the entrepreneurial subject to which it is tied. The Look of Silence enters into a space made possible by the first film in order to claim a right to look that is founded on vulnerability, relationality, and responsivity as opposed to inviolable sovereignty.

In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  211

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On Vertigo Oppenheimer’s Indonesia films extend the spectrum of responses typically associated with the cultural imaginary of human rights—such as sympathy, objectification, recognition, identification and mis-identification, denial, response-ability, or condemnation—and the so-called human rights cycle of violation, testimony, redress, and justice or healing. In their place, Oppenheimer generates a sense of vertigo: “this emotional pendulum where you do feel empathy but you also feel repulsion, enchantment, and horror, absurdity and something extremely serious.”45 As a theoretical concept, vertigo comprises the affective and emotional pendulum that Oppenheimer describes; however, it also has material political effects in reorienting political subjects in a given context. Vertigo destabilizes existing narratives of (or silences around) atrocity by revealing their constructions in the operations of visuality, thus making possible new political claims. Moreover, vertigo locates agency in both the active work of imagination that destabilization demands, and in the subsequent political choices it generates. In medical terms, vertigo, most often caused by an inner ear or vestibular disorder, results from disequilibrium among the senses that together otherwise produce the feeling of balance. When the inner ear, eyes, skin, and other sensors incorrectly send signals of motion instead of stasis, and the body is unable to make the fine adjustments necessary for balance, orientation, and stabilization, the result can be dizziness (either the sensation that one’s surroundings are spinning or that the self is spinning), unsteadiness, nausea, and vomiting. Its treatments include various exercises to retrain sensory perception and processing. These exercises can train the brain to recalibrate the information it receives, so that it compensates for the lack of equilibrium the senses convey. Alternatively, patients can learn to compensate psychologically to some extent by anchoring the gaze and consciously refocusing on the stability they know (cognitively) exists despite the (incorrect) sensory evidence to the contrary. Whereas the medical definition of vertigo depends upon disruptions to spatial awareness, those definitions drawn from the humanities and social sciences also integrate a temporal component to describe the disarticulation of perspective with the historical moment, although vertigo remains a condition of vulnerability, danger, and misapprehension that needs treating. According to psychoanalysis and trauma theory, a psychological sense of vertigo often results from the experience of atrocity. Psychoanalytic definitions of trauma as a breach of the psychic shield that protects the subject (and thereby ensures the subject’s sense of coherence) infer that trauma can produce a radically destabilized, dislocated sense of self—often described by victims as a loss of self or a loss of trust in the bond between the self and the world—and, with it, uneven, nonlinear, or aporetic witnessing and testimonial narratives. Contemporary postcolonial trauma theorists such as Stef Craps argue against a universalizing approach to recognizing and treating trauma within

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212  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder fixed narrative frames of illness, healing, and health. Reading trauma as universal across cultures and histories ignores its local causes, discourses, and practices of healing or resilience, or subordinates those roots and attributes to a largely western, medicalized discourse. Although the vertigo produced through The Act of Killing stems from the trauma that victims of the 1965– 66 atrocities experienced, the film focuses primarily on the perpetrators’ as opposed to victims’ perspectives as well as on the longue durée, extending into the present, of its eventness, to borrow again from Peter Hitchcock. The temporal frames in the film are multiplied and conjoined through the use of historical recreation, present tense documentation, and fantasy. These temporal frames also shape the relationality of different psychic, individual, communal, national, and international spaces that the film constructs. It is also worth noting that although the film does portray the ordinariness of the perpetrators and their attempt to come to terms with their actions, its purpose is not their individual suffering so much as the larger (national) political and psychic toll of the murders and their legacy: the neoliberal policies that the national government pursues and that impunity-inspired fear facilitates. At the same time, by focusing on one perpetrator, Anwar Congo of Medan, North Sumatra, and his closest associates, the film has been critiqued for its lack of explicit attention to the victims and survivors’ stories as well as to the government’s role in outsourcing and then profiting from both the murder campaign and the social fear that followed. I develop Oppenheimer’s description of vertigo in the film not in order to expand discussion of the destabilization Anwar personally experiences, but to consider how that destabilization provides a window onto the wider operations of the social imaginary. When vertigo has been used in other studies to describe specific historical frameworks, it also bears a sense of illness and crisis. In The Vertigo of Late Modernity, for instance, Jock Young defines vertigo as “the malaise of late modernity: a sense of insecurity[,] of insubstantiality, and of uncertainty, a whiff of chaos and a fear of falling.”46 Similarly, in Apartheid Vertigo, David M. Matsinhe refers to the “dizzying sensation of tilting and spinning that convolutes our surroundings, disorients and distorts our reality perception” to describe the post-Apartheid distortions of race, power and identity in South Africa that, despite political change, continue to produce a hierarchical, racialized ideology and society.47 From another angle, James Dawes defines something akin to vertigo as an essential first step in the process of transforming ordinary people into perpetrators, by removing them from their familiar contexts, undermining established parameters of moral behavior, and rewarding behaviors that would previously have been condemned. In Dawes’s discussion, however, destabilization is merely a means to establishing other, firmly enforced behavioral patterns. “In war,” he writes, “everything is weird. The landscape is foreign, seemingly unreal; we are separated from all the reference groups we have come to rely upon for moral judgment; nothing is familiar; there are no reality checks. War

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  213 confuses us. In that confusion we begin to create new moral realities.”48 What is remarkable about The Act of Killing is that it does not work to convey a sense of vertigo that the perpetrators experienced, thereby explaining their actions; rather, it produces vertigo as an effect of performativity. As a result, perpetrator-actors and viewers are caught in the vortex of those performances, such that it becomes necessary to reassess their/our relationships to a stabilizing narrative of national identity constructed in terms of freedom and security. In The Look of Silence, vertigo is linked more explicitly to the experience of atrocity and stems from the multiple forms of precariousness the film renders. Viewers witness the corporeal and psychological effects of pervasive fear in intimate scenes with Adi’s parents, in the social reproduction of historical fiction in his children’s classroom, and in the power former perpetrators still hold and threaten constantly to violently wield. Functioning on affective, emotional, corporeal, social, and political levels, these displays of precarious existence delineate the scope of fear and silence and in doing so make them available for scrutiny. Vertigo arises first from the interplay of these different forms of precariousness and the radical destabilization of existence that they make visible. The film also functions vertiginously by exploiting the gap between imagination and perception, a gap that ­Mirzoeff defines as crucial to understanding visuality as the work of the social imaginary. The synesthesia of perceiving silence through visuality offers one example. In addition, this gap is evidenced by the heterogeneous temporalities referenced by the different forms of precariousness and vulnerability and made visible in the film. It is not just that the past, present, and Adi’s hope for an imagined future co-exist in the film, although that too is happening, but that the film unveils the different temporal modes or entanglements within which its storytelling takes place: a human lifespan, a nation’s history, the vicissitudes of memory, and the way film makes the past available to the present (e.g., when viewers see Adi screening earlier interviews Oppenheimer conducted with perpetrators in which they proudly recount their actions). Finally, whereas typically vertigo increases one’s vulnerability to disorientation, injury, and harm and, therefore, requires treatment, The Look of Silence reverses these terms. I read Adi’s encounters with perpetrators as a form of self-precaritization (made possible by the film) that produces vertigo among viewers and his interviewees precisely to destabilize and then re-orient the existing visual and verbal discursive field. In meditating on the difficult task of scholarly work in human rights and on perpetrators in particular, Dawes describes its effects on the viewer or the receiver of testimony. Interviewing the Japanese men, now frail and elderly, who had committed rape, torture, and murder during the invasion of Nanjing in the Second Sino-Japanese War, he writes, “I sometimes felt like I was receiving a guided tour of hell. It was a feeling of intimacy and vertigo at the same time, of being directed and, simultaneously, being lost.”49 This sense of spatial and temporal dislocation, while discomfiting in and of itself,

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214  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder demands new forms of framing: of narrativization, contextualization, and visualization. Whereas Dawes responds to the challenge in scholarly terms through an approach that is, at once, episodic, self-reflective, analytical and meditative, Oppenheimer pursues its productive potential through the right to look and the countervisualizations that right generates. The right to look, then, takes two different forms in the two films: in The Act of Killing it comes from the investigation into the performativity of violence, which de-couples the performances from the ideology that sought to naturalize those performances; in The Look of Silence, it comes from the subject’s purposeful endangerment in an atrocity whose most egregious effects he did not experience directly, yet that remains powerfully present. Vertigo in both films and in the sense of both spatial and temporal dislocation demands attention to the balance that has been lost or might be gained as well as to the strategies for achieving it, attributes with specific cultural, historical, and political referents. The films thus prompt a reassessment of the genre of human rights documentary. If genre is “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take,”50 in Lauren Berlant’s definition, then the vertigo produced in and by the films through the performativity of both sovereignty and vulnerability also rewrites the contract between documentary and viewer by upending expectations and expanding the genre.

Performativity and Vertigo in The Act of Killing Oppenheimer has described The Act of Killing as “a documentary of the imagination” rather than of an occurrence or “everyday life,”51 noting that he and his partners “developed a filmmaking method […] to understand why extreme violence, that we would hope would be unimaginable, is not only the exact opposite, but also routinely performed.”52 This filmmaking method resists conventional readerly or viewer desires: it does not cultivate sympathy for victims, demonize perpetrators, or reward viewers for their engagement (financial or otherwise). The film employs an aesthetic of excess and of blurred spaces and times to generate audience responses to both the atrocities and the project of reenactment that incorporate empathy, disgust, horror, and condemnation, while resisting the closure any one of these responses might offer on its own. On the one hand, empathy, disgust, horror, and condemnation may each function separately to reify fixed identities by securing the distance between the judger and judged, ascribing agency solely to the former and upon the latter. And, the sanction of moral reprobation or humanitarian concern may derive some of its force by de-historicizing its own judgment so that it appears timeless and everlasting. In The Act of Killing, however, those spatial and temporal foundations that support normative identifications are confounded through the workings of performativity. Rather than a conventional historical documentary approach, the film takes as its

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  215 point of departure the cinema-inspired memories and fantasies of a group of perpetrators. The Act of Killing at once facilitates and documents their re-­imagination of their crimes, which have been heretofore commended as acts of heroic nationalism. In doing so, the film, in conjunction with a contemporaneous human rights campaign, creates a political and ethical space within Indonesia, which was previously foreclosed, through a re-enactment and ultimately an unmasking of the violent foundations of official nationalism. Throughout Indonesia, the government designated local groups to carry out the violence, depending on their authority within those regions. In North Sumatra, the outsourcing of the genocide to gangsters and the still active Pancasila Youth organization played upon the gangsters’ close identification with Hollywood films and lucrative black market in movie tickets, both of which were threatened by leftists who organized boycotts in the 1960s of American film imports. Forty-plus years later in their own film, the aging gangsters anticipate the fulfillment of their own fantasies: they will get to approximate the famous characters whom they imitated in styling murder; stardom will transport them from the social margins closer to the center of socio-economic power of those who benefitted more lavishly from the gangsters’ direct crimes; and the bright light of their filmic and national acclaim will banish any shadows of the imagination where ethical qualms might linger. This petty narcissism also illuminates what Dawes calls the paradox of evil, of perpetrators as at once exceptional and all too human. Despite the “moral affront” it might occasion, “[i]f we allow ourselves to imagine that evil is somehow extraordinary, somehow beyond the human,” Dawes argues, “then we can never identify and address the very ordinary situational and organizational features that regularly produce it.”53 The power of The Act of Killing comes from its strange blend of the quotidian and the bizarre, excessive, or phantasmagorical. Rather than draw attention away from the banal and toward the fantastical, Oppenheimer and his crew highlight the role of performativity in identities the character-subjects inhabit and enact across that spectrum. Performativity in the film erases distinctions between what is taken for granted and what is extraordinary as well as between daily life and film acting; it spotlights the performativity of what has been normalized through the very operations of visuality. The blended modes of fantasy and documentary, each with their own performative codes, not only traverse a plethora of spatial scales (e.g., the psychic spaces of nightmares and desires, the protagonist’s bedroom, the movie set, the national media studio, the murder roof deck, the city, the nation, the spaces occupied by international audiences and human rights norms); those modes also disrupt the temporal unity that sustains official nationalism predicated on a progressive narrative of masculinized national strength and capital accumulation.

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216  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder The perpetrators’ ignorance of documentary film as a genre freed their vision from its norms and conventions. The scenes within The Act of Killing are constructed with reference to Hollywood war movies as well as the perpetrators’ collective imagination of what is majestic, beautiful, and powerful. Oppenheimer frames those reenactments with a more extensive trailing of and interviews with his three main subjects, always unmasking his own presence behind the camera in the process. Although Anwar Congo, the film’s focus, and Oppenheimer are pursuing different personal and professional goals throughout the endeavor, at times the difference between the two films (the one the perpetrators pursue and the one Oppenheimer completes) blurs in terms of their performances and their aesthetics. In some scenes, the perpetrators have their own film crew, and showing the crew in action allows Oppenheimer to frame the perpetrators’ negotiatory process over the construction of their visualization. In other cases, Oppenheimer notes that Anwar “was incapable of acting well when there was a script.” Thus, in particularly difficult emotional scenes, Oppenheimer’s crew would replace Anwar’s—to “make it quieter [… for him … and to] create spaces in which he could design a scene, call action, act the scene, call cut, and reflect on the scene, all in the same take, where he and his friends were free to improvise.”54 Such moments underscore the extent to which Oppenheimer’s crew do not so much document something that exists as document the process of bringing the imaginative work of the perpetrators to filmic fruition. Through that process, roles of victim, perpetrator, director, actor, subject, and viewer often leak into one another, or exist in simultaneous contradiction, making it difficult to ascribe a moral perspective to a specific positionality or identity. In place of fixed historical and dramatic roles, Oppenheimer presents the distant viewer with layers of performativity that continually refract and reflect back on one another. Although The Act of Killing includes just a brief scene from G30S, its gory aesthetic and gendered logic influence some of Anwar and his friends’ formal choices, often producing incoherent results. The ostensibly easy identification of national heroes and villains, of the generals and the Communists, in the purges as the propaganda dictated is undone cinematically when Anwar and his friends re-enact the September 30th event. In this attempt, the gendered logic of the propaganda unravels, and the repercussions of that unraveling echo throughout the film. In a scene modeled after G30S, Anwar and Adi are made-up to look like the generals who were killed, such that they place themselves as the victims of the crime (the coup attempt) that would turn them into perpetrators (Fig. 5.1). Oppenheimer includes footage of Anwar remembering the annual, mandatory school screenings of G30S and his pride “because I killed the Communists who looked so cruel in the film.” However, what should be a clear, gendered distinction between the grotesque threat the Communist women’s group ostensibly poses on the one hand and rational, entrepreneurial subjectivity on the other becomes difficult to read because of the actors’ own performances.

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  217

Figure 5.1  Adi Zulkadry and Anwar Congo. Photo by Anonymous. Still from The Act of Killing (2012). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

Despite participation in the mass murders that G30S implicitly condones as necessary to save the nation from the sadistic predations of a feminized Communism, Anwar never received the kinds of financial rewards for his crimes that accrued to the elite, and he consistently has trouble performing the hyper-masculinized roles of those elites who profit from the neoliberal re-scripting of laws and freedom. This difficulty seems compounded by a scene that would require him to play the victim of the Communists, a role that admits to the vulnerability of the ostensibly sovereign subject. While Anwar seems out of place in the scene (Oppenheimer shows him, for instance, still in make-up and directing behind the camera), his younger side-kick, Herman, offers a performance as a gleeful, grotesque, flamboyantly transgendered assassin who relishes her task. Herman’s campy performance as a member of the Gerwani exposes the gap between imagination and reality and undermines the gendered binary logic that sustains the need for egregiously masculine, extra-legal securitization. His performance makes it possible to recognize that third meaning of projection implicit in Anwar’s earlier statement about projecting himself into history. As Oppenheimer has noted, “this kind of cannibalistic orgy of violence, which is depicted in G30S, is to project a fantasy of the victims in the image of the perpetrators and thereby to justify retrospectively, retroactively what the perpetrators have done.”55 Whereas most discussions of The Act of Killing understandably focus on Anwar, I find Herman to be crucial to the disruption of visuality that the film engenders (Fig. 5.2). Herman’s physical excesses (evident in his rotundity as well as in such quotidian yet grotesque actions as toothpaste foam dripping down his bare belly while he brushes), love of acting, and penchant

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218  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder for cross-dressing that often seems borrowed from the drag queens in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) create moments of radical incongruity with the hyper-masculine codes of the paramilitaries and government officials. The film depicts repeatedly the ways in which egregious masculine norms in the available personae of the gangster and the paramilitary are predatory rather than protective. Paramilitary and government leaders unabashedly make lewd and obscene comments to the coterie of young women who surround them, and that flagrant objectification seems easily transferrable to other persons. In a particularly notable example, one of the local Pancasila members who also performs in Anwar’s film boasts of raping young girls while he lounges during a break in filming a village burning re-enactment—a scene populated by Pancasila family members and neighbors who play the victims. Such moments expose the rationale for the purges as fictions, even though their violence is both real and seemingly imminent.

Figure 5.2  Herman Koto. Still from The Act of Killing (2012). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

Although acting within the perpetrators’ scripts of their crimes, Herman (who was too young to participate in the mass murders) distances himself from the egregious masculinity (represented most obviously by Pancasila leader Yapto Soerjosoemarno) through his flamboyant performances as women and in his moments of tenderness, such as wiping his daughter’s nose when she cries or attending to Anwar. Although Herman is eager to capitalize upon the potential for graft and extortion that masculinized positions of authority represent, these performances repeatedly fail. A memorable sequence shows Herman during his unsuccessful campaign for parliament. He can’t remember his lines (the first of which is: “I am Herman”); he is

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  219 more adept at frightening than listening to constituents; and he does not know how to answer their demands. Oppenheimer documents Herman’s electoral loss via a process already revealed to be farcical, in a shot from above, looking down at Herman as he lies exposed on his bed and tells his daughter to be brave no matter what challenges she faces. The Herman that re-emerges in front of the camera after the loss of the election foregoes restraint and embraces all the liberties possible in his dramatic roles in Anwar’s film. Herman’s often feminized, campy performativity underscores the limits of social positions otherwise available to him and enables him to claim a marginalized space from which, finally, to speak and to act, albeit in ways that are only acceptable within the confines of the film. Out of his elaborate costumes, when barely clothed or dressed casually, Herman is regularly contradicted and denigrated by his companions as fat, ugly, and smelly, especially next to Anwar’s fastidiousness and vanity. In drag, however, Herman always steals the scene, and his embodiment of spectacular excess gives corporeal, moral, and aesthetic expression to the horror that conventional narratives cannot contain. This expression comprises both visually striking compositions and the complicated aesthetics of disgust—as when he grotesquely parodies the government propaganda film, portraying a Communist woman eating a victim’s organs and smearing herself with blood, a performance which makes Anwar (who portrays the victim)—and perhaps some viewers—audibly gag. In an early interview about the film, Oppenheimer expressed his desire to “create an experience which overflows the boundaries […] to create a toxic mess which is hard to clean up.”56 Herman’s corporeal and dramatic excesses overflow the boundaries of gendered norms to reveal the toxicity of those norms as opposed to his performances. He shows sovereign, securitized subjectivity to be a violent expression of economic and political privilege, rather than gendered naturalism. Given that Herman’s most successful performances can only take place on screen, the film implicitly asks whether alternative subject positions exist for people like Herman. A final scene (from the Director’s Cut of the film) of Herman suggests this is unlikely. Closely shot from directly opposite his large head and belly, Oppenheimer shows Herman bare-chested, drumming, and screaming at full volume. Unlike the self-pitying monologue when he lost his political campaign, or, by contrast, his theatrical, campy performances as a threat to the nation, Herman in the drumming scene conveys a sense of horror that is linked visually and audibly with the body. This display of humanness in its bare corporeal, sensory expression is no less performance than previous scenes; however, it underscores the baseness, contradictions, and hollowness of existing narrative frames around the mass murders and the culture of impunity that followed. And although Herman cannot represent the victims or translate their experiences, his scream invokes recognition of all those throats choked, eyes unclosed, blood spilled, and bodies thrown over the bridge. Like the earlier shot of him exposed on his bed, this scene calls for new roles, new actors, and new stories.

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220  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder The substitution of phantasmagorical for documentary aesthetics provides another source of perspectival vertigo. An early, decontextualized scene shows dancing showgirls perched before a waterfall on a mountainous slope, while a voice off camera coaches them, “Smile. More teeth […] And natural beauty. This isn’t fake.” Oppenheimer returns to this moment later in the film, and it becomes a climactic moment in the perpetrators’ imagination of their own moral absolution. With music replacing the coaching, the perpetrators portray themselves being awarded medals (by their victims!) in heaven for their good deeds on earth. The redemption promised the characters-actors is foreclosed by the film’s aesthetics. As Oppenheimer describes, “It’s tacky—the characters are glowing ever so slightly—but it’s also undeniably majestic. This comes in a moment in the film when we’re all very vulnerable, and so it has force.”57 The film creates a delicate balance between expressing the perpetrators’ highly stylized imaginations and warning against their pernicious effects. In such moments, the ability of aesthetic seduction to interpellate the viewer into the fantasies it construes is undone by Oppenheimer’s editing, which consistently frames such scenes within the larger project, distancing the viewer from the fantasy itself. Similarly, the scene mentioned earlier of an attack on a village—shot from a distance through fire, with women and children screaming and crying, to model a Hollywood war film—separates the sound from the image and ends with scene director’s shout: “Cut, cut, cut!” Editing in The Act of Killing at once emphasizes and destabilizes the boundaries between the perpetrators’ imaginative reenactments and their present-day performance of life, not off-camera (Oppenheimer is still filming them), but off set. One example places the men’s actions in their international legal context and concludes when Adi, who remains unapologetic about his participation in the mass murders, tells Oppenheimer, “I’d be famous […] Please. Get me called to the Hague!” The film cuts to a shot of Herman in hot pink drag, sitting before a natural landscape, as he watches the show girls emerge from the mouth of a giant sculptural fish, as they are directed in their choreographed dance routine (Fig. 5.2). Which image is the most incongruous, phantasmagorical, unbelievable, the film implicitly asks. Although the cut separates Oppenheimer and the perpetrators’ film projects, the juxtaposition also emphasizes how the fantasies that subtend the perpetrators’ imaginations connect the two works. In this way, The Act of Killing continually manifests its own process. Although the fantasies appear on one level to be idiosyncratically individualized, as when Anwar films the harlequinesque figure who haunts his nightmares, The Act of Killing reminds viewers that the perpetrators featured are representative of a larger cultural imaginary and political system. This is evident in the borrowings from G30S, as discussed above, and in the easy familiarity between the main characters and members of the ruling class whose luxuries and authority the mass murders secured, as well as in the filmmaking process that documents its dependence on communal

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  221 engagement. In recruiting other actors, including children, for their dramas, asking that they share in a fantastical re-imagination of those events, perpetrators not only script these actors into their fantasies, they also necessarily remind their family, friends, and neighbors of the violent underbelly of the current regime. Auditions of the paramilitaries’ family members and neighbors who act in the film seek those who can cry and shriek on demand, who—among genocide’s beneficiaries, bystanders, or those who were not yet born—are willing to play a victim or another perpetrator. The filmmaking process, in other words, not only charts the spectacularized imagination of its three main subjects; it also demands imagination within the perpetrators’ closest community of different subject positions available or imposed during genocide.58 In its focus on three different men, The Act of Killing explores three distinct outcomes to the destabilization of prevailing visuality. Herman, as noted previously, breaks down the gendered logic intrinsic to the dominant history; however, he is left with no viable alternative to the social position his membership in the Pancasila Youth guarantees. Adi Zulkadry, the most intellectual and apparently financially successful of the group, is introduced last in the film, wearing a t-shirt bearing the slogan “Apathetic” and obviously reluctant to revisit the past. He understands quickly that their performances will not project their heroism into the present in Grand Marquee style, and calls the propaganda film G30S they all cling to for absolution “a lie,” reminding the others that the Communist Party was not even illegal before 1965 and that the government has never issued a formal apology for the killings; yet he remains bound to the film by his loyalty to his friends and his stake in the status quo. With comments such as “‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners. I’m a winner. So I can make my own definition. I needn’t follow the international definitions,” he simultaneously invokes and rejects an international standard, admits and refuses responsibility, and finally replaces responsibility with increasing hostility toward the director. Despite his recalcitrance, Adi insists on crucial points in the film: that gangsters, paramilitaries, and intellectuals cooperated in the genocide; that genocide resulted from political opportunism (that the film they are making is “not a problem for us[;] [i]t’s a problem for history”); that bystanders’ claims of ignorance of the torture and murders were and are untenable; that perpetrators, perhaps with the assistance of “nerve doctors” and “nerve vitamins,” can carry on without nightmares, even when they recognize their own actions were indefensible. Through these statements, Adi clearly indicates that those empowered by Suharto’s New Order government can choose visuality or the right to look, and, therefore, that The Act of Killing is not revealing something new so much as bringing the operations of visuality to the cinematic surface. The third outcome for perpetrators is represented by Anwar Congo, the film’s focus, who undergoes a transformation during the years of filming. An early interview shows him on a neighborhood rooftop, where he had committed hundreds of murders, usually by strangling his victims with a

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222  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder wire. After proudly demonstrating his method, Anwar dances a few steps of the cha-cha for the camera. Anwar’s dance steps may read as a “mechanism to try to forget” or to mask,59 as a metaphor for impunity, or as at once a deflection and a failed search for a language to respond to his past—it resists a single reading, though it is resolutely horrifying. The horror here is a combination of fear (not of his personal capacity for murder but the conditions that normalized murder as a function of legitimate government) and disgust that has “no distancing or evasive strategies” available “that are not in themselves utterly contaminating.”60 Horror becomes palpable in the cinematography, when Oppenheimer seems to overcome his desire to recoil from this scene, to stop filming, and instead holds fast so as not to foreclose the sequence. The Act of Killing concludes on that same rooftop, at the end of the filmmaking process, and this time Anwar retches in a seemingly cathartic moment of ethical recognition and responsibility. In this sense, Anwar, as the viewer’s main point of identification, appears to be on the cusp of moral re-grounding. This conclusion has been critiqued for the way it seemingly posits Anwar’s private, moral development—confirmed by his retching as a somatic response to a deeper realization of his actions—to provide a sense of closure for the film and proof of its efforts. In these readings, Anwar’s self-disgust implies that The Act of Killing has done its work in forcing a perpetrator to recognize his culpability; moreover, that work asks little of viewers except to congratulate themselves on their own moral standing. In this way, Anwar’s final retching reconfirms a shame or disgust that one should feel. Disgust as both a by-product and cause of nausea and vomiting here registers to confirm “moral and social community,” along the lines argued by William Ian Miller.61 Viewers’ revulsion at the first scene on the rooftop spreads during the course of the film to the regime that promoted the genocide; however, it does so in conjunction with necessary acceptance of Anwar’s ordinariness. The film juxtaposes, for instance, the seemingly gentle Anwar playing with his young grandsons with his petty vanity in choosing his clothes and fixing his teeth, days spent hanging out with little to do, desire for approval from the more successful gangsters and government officials he visits, and seemingly lonely moments in his cramped room. Benedict Anderson describes the three men as “nobodies”: “Elderly men, with decaying muscles and petty bourgeois clothes and homes, few visible signs of prestige, no medals, only local fear.”62 The film portrays the distance between their flimsy heroics and their role as the “moral menials,” in Miller’s words, who “have to get morally dirty to do what the polity needs them to do.”63 Ibrahim Sinik, the newspaper publisher and communist interrogator, confirms this position when he boasts that as a torturer and “as a newspaper man, my job was to make the public hate [Communists],” and adds proudly that he did not ever need to murder or dispose of bodies directly, because he could delegate the manual labor of murder to Anwar and his friends. In this sense, Anwar’s evident disgust with himself reconfirms the viewer’s sense of abhorrence at the

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  223 killings, an abhorrence that men such as Sinik or Adi (who advises Anwar to “find the right excuses” for his crimes) do not share. Anwar’s disgust concludes the film by transforming turpitude into the reassurance of moral foundation and thereby rewarding the viewer’s identification with him. Although I, too, am wary of how a conclusion based upon Anwar’s moral development would only further foreclose the stories of victims and survivors, I understand his retching differently. Whereas closure and moral re-grounding could indicate the restoration of liberal subjectivity after the vertiginous experience of confronting his own past, I read his retching as an indication of the failure of that model and, thus, the impossibility of closure, stability, and re-grounding. If, as Gilson has argued, invulnerability is predicated on a mind/body split that distributes corporeal vulnerability and injurability outside itself as a sign of its own inviolability, then Anwar’s retching demonstrates the failure of that model. Even as it produces moral satisfaction and closure, the “idiom of disgust”64 unravels them. As Miller explains, disgust is profoundly linked to corporeality, so that Anwar’s vomiting serves as “proof” of his moral growth: Anwar’s retching is “real” and cathartic for both him and the viewer. At the same time, as Oppenheimer recounts, “I don’t think he’s simulating nausea or retching, but I think that he’s also acting. By this time we’d been filming together for four years. He knows how to be in front of the camera. He knows how to move for the camera. It’s not something that he’s doing willfully. He is in a state of performance [… just as] at the time of the killings Anwar was also performing”65 by imitating the film characters he loved best. Identification with the victim and performance come also together at this moment in the most corporeal way. Oppenheimer notes “the [choking] sounds Anwar makes in this scene imitate the sounds his victims made as he killed them, expressing in phantom ways how it might have felt to have your neck garroted with a wire and pulled tight until it cuts into your windpipe. The choking that Anwar experiences is exactly that, and it is a terrible sound indeed.”66 As opposed to a pre-ideological or phenomenological reading of embodied suffering67 or a reassertion of coherent, moral, and rational subjectivity—either of which would take Anwar outside of performance to something “real,” his retching stands as yet another layer of performance with material effects. Although Anwar’s final performance evinces disgust with his role as perpetrator, that conclusion also stems from his decision to play victims in many of the scenes and thus his newfound ability to identify with them. Referring to these earlier scenes, Oppenheimer poses the question: “Why does he act that role instead of the killer’s? Because what he sees when he kills is the victim’s face, what he knows is how the victim’s face looks [… T]here’s this double-ness that is totally disarming. You want to empathize with him because you want to believe he’s empathizing with his victim. But you’re not sure. And then it dawns on you that it’s the killer re-enacting his own crimes.”68 This double-ness produces a nauseating, physical vertigo for Anwar when he reflects back on it; and, it produces a moral vertigo for viewers whose point of

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224  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder identification has been so radically destabilized. In this way, Anwar’s physical reaction on the rooftop only further destabilizes the visualization within which he was initially legible. What matters, in other words, is less the possible growth of Anwar as a character, than the shifting operations of visuality which enable his transformation from proud to self-disgusted, along with the recognition of vulnerability that transformation entails. Vertigo ultimately cannot offer moral closure for either Anwar or the viewer. Anwar’s retching, for instance, does not end his nightmares, where he is faced with the ghosts of his victims and haunted by “those eyes I didn’t close,” much as the baby’s face in Abani’s Song for Night keeps My Luck from rest. Attempting to subdue haunting by re-enacting it similarly fails. In recreating a scene of his nightmare, Anwar has trouble speaking his lines, and the film crew and his colleagues are disappointed with his performance. Worsening Anwar’s situation, the harlequin ghost is played by the newspaper reporter, who consistently denies having known about the killings that were orchestrated by his boss and committed in his office. In the context of these unbelievable denials, Anwar’s failure in this scene is caused less by guilt over his individual actions than the realization that the political system in which he operated was and remains violently corrupt. Again and again “the film brings to the surface a trauma that is always already there.”69 In the scene of the Pancasila Youth burning down a village, for example, the haunting of the past manifests on the set as well as in the organization’s futile attempts to frame the image as brutal and decisive, but not cruel and excessive. Whereas the paramilitary actors, playing themselves, display fervor in an attempt to impress the Deputy Minister of Youth and Sport who has come to see the day’s filming, he shrewdly recognizes the incompatibility of that mob fervor, with its chants of murder and extermination, with legitimate government. That footage, he suggests, should be used to demonstrate how brutal they “could” be, not how they acted: “[T]hink of it as a simulation of our rage.” Note, too, his choice of pronouns. His inability to reconcile the past with a legitimate history demonstrates the haunting effects of the ruling class’s legacy of violence. For the participants who play the villagers, the experience is equally difficult to contain. Some of the children appear terrorized by their participation; the actor Suryono (discussed further below) who has been playing a victim, nervously shakes the hand of a perpetrator (apparently for a job well done, or was it for sparing his life?); and one woman who appears dazed after the shoot has an exorcism performed to rid her of ghosts from a mass grave that was discovered nearby during the filming and had been making the actors uneasy.70 Each of these reactions bespeaks the haunting presence of a past that has been improperly acknowledged and of victims who have not been publicly mourned. For the viewer, one of the most emotionally troubling moments of the film, and the only one that deals directly with survivor testimony, also works through this collapsing of different roles and temporalities into one another and the comingling of disgust and empathy in corporeal representation. While Anwar

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  225 and Adi are directing a scene (yet, strangely, still in make-up and costume), Oppenheimer introduces one of its actors, Suryono, simply as “Anwar’s neighbor.” During a break in the shooting, though still on the set, Suryono begins to narrate his Chinese stepfather’s abduction and murder during the purge. The camera tracks Herman, Adi, Anwar, and other participants’ discomfort while Suryono recounts how, when he was eleven or twelve years old, his stepfather was taken at 3:00 a.m., how the family found his body in an oil drum, how “we buried him like a goat” when neighbors were afraid to help, and how the family was sent to a camp at the edge of the jungle where Suryono had to teach himself to read and write. The perpetrators’ reactions are not surprising: “Look, everything’s been planned.” “We can’t include every story or the film will never end.” “And your story is too complicated. It would take days to shoot.” In the context of the story The Act of Killing wants to tell, by including Suryono’s testimony, Oppenheimer counters the perpetrators’ desire to excise it; however, that narrative balance came later, when Oppenheimer came upon the scene while he was reviewing extra footage. At the time of filming, another cameraman captured this conversation without being aware of its content, and Oppenheimer was not aware that Suryono had shared his personal story before resuming his acting in an interrogation scene.71 In that scene, Suryono plays the victim while various actors ask Anwar who is standing by to “teach us how to torture.” As Suryono breaks down while re-enacting something akin to what may have been his stepfather’s experience, the actors, too, seem barely able to distinguish whether their actions are dramatizations or might really cause harm. Their language slides in and out of commentary and performance in ways that are obviously terrifying to Suryono, now blindfolded, gagged, and sputtering, and potentially profoundly disturbing to viewers. This single moment of survivor testimony emerges in the gap between the film’s process and its subject, and in the shifts in gaze that attend to each. At first glance, Suryono’s testimony seems to interrupt the fantasies, re-enactments, and dramatizations that ostensibly separate the social imaginary from victims and survivors’ material reality. From this perspective, his testimony is disturbing precisely because it introduces the “real” upon the set. Even if Anwar and his friends refuse to incorporate Suryono’s story into their own, the circumstances require them to acknowledge his experience. On another level, however, his testimony is disturbing not solely for its content but more profoundly for the way it reveals what Rancière calls the “fault” between film’s intensification of its object and of its own gaze. In his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Rancière focuses on a moment of “inversion which is to transform the gaze of the detective investigating an obsession into a gaze itself obsessed with its object.”72 When these gazes align, “the deployment of images in the film seems to coincide exactly with the logic of the story.”73 This alignment occurs in The Act of Killing when viewers see the juxtaposition of Suryono’s testimony and the torture scene that follows it: the editing initially appears to privilege Oppenheimer’s story over his subject’s and allows viewers to share the director’s ostensible

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226  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder moral satisfaction of recognizing the testimony that perpetrators wish to ignore; however, this moral comfort dissolves with the added knowledge that Suryono’s testimony was filmed by a different cameraman (neither Oppenheimer nor Anwar), who did not understand its content and thus presumably attended to the mise-en-scène as opposed to the “real.” That knowledge of the unwitting cameraman introduces a third gaze and, therefore, three different angles on what must figure as Suryono’s performance. Rather than confirm moral authority, Suryono’s breakdown now disturbs it. Not only is it unclear where his acting ends and his own fear, grief, and rage take over, it is also unclear which gaze frames the scene and, therefore, the authority to which it is tethered. This dizziness only increases when viewers recognize Suryono as an actor in so many other scenes that Anwar films. How do viewers understand his compulsion to dramatize and re-dramatize these horrific events, often in fantastical styles? Unlike a humanitarian appeal or an advocacy film that produces and employs the emotional registers of sympathy or outrage, or even irony, The Act of Killing continually shifts the foundations upon which a stable relationship between viewer and viewed might rest. This is not because there is ambiguity about the atrocities that were committed or their legacy of fear and impunity, but because the film refuses the closure and moral satisfaction that comes from exposure of as opposed to engagement with the operations of visuality. By emphasizing the destabilizing effects of performativity in its various registers (affective, emotional, identitarian, and historical), the film denaturalizes the visual terrain upon which they occur. What the film’s executive producers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris call the “limbo land between fantasy and reality” pushes at the limits of documentary aesthetics and the forms of political subjectivity they represent.74

Vertigo and Vulnerability in The Look of Silence Oppenheimer has described The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence as companion films that “mutually illuminate each other” and stem from the same incident.75 During the filming of perpetrators that led Oppenheimer to Anwar Congo (who was the forty-first perpetrator interviewed), Oppenheimer learned of Adi Rukun’s brother Ramli’s death and discovered the leaders of Ramli’s death squad among his interviewees. Ramli’s death served as a touchstone for survivors because it was witnessed and the victim was named, one out of the 10,500 murders that took place during the same period by the Snake River. Although the discovery that he had interviewed Ramli’s torturers and murderers occurred before he made The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer only revisited these men with Adi Rukun approximately a decade later in the interval between The Act of Killing’s completion and its release. This complicated chronology of the films’ composition enfolds another chronology of their effects. First, Oppenheimer recognized the need to film the remainder of the material that would become The Look of Silence in

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  227 the space between perpetrators’ cooperation in the first project and the ­counter-visualization The Act of Killing would make possible upon its release, at which point Oppenheimer knew, too, it would be unsafe for him to return to Indonesia. Second, in his confrontations with his brother’s attackers, Adi stages a claim to the right to look that is roughly synchronous to the disclosure of the operations of visuality that The Act of Killing offers. The two films differ aesthetically, affectively, and emotionally in their focus, respectively, on perpetrators versus survivors, on what is phantasmagorical versus material, and in styles that are flamboyant and spectacular versus quiet and subdued. However, the radical potential of The Look of Silence and Adi’s claim is more clearly realizable after The Act of Killing. On its own, The Look of Silence is a generous and moving film that functions more conventionally in its depiction of a survivor’s journey and its realist aesthetics. In the aftermath of The Act of Killing’s release and its disturbance of the visual field, however, Adi’s political subjectivization (in Rancière and Mirzoeff’s sense) can emerge. The filmmaking process at once reveals and construes the operations of visuality that Adi wishes to disrupt, and it offers the necessary physical protection for him to do so. The signature image of the film (Fig. 5.3) serves as a synecdoche of this process in its depiction of a perpetrator who is having his eyes checked by Adi in what will become a confrontation. What does this man want to see or not to see? And how can the film proffer different lenses on the aftermath of mass murder? In terms of its work as a documentary, the film offers what may be the first cinematic portrayal of survivors confronting perpetrators who are still in power.76 That this is a political claim to the right to look manifests in relation to the lack of complementary human rights action that would posit Adi as a victim.

Figure 5.3  Inong with glasses. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

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228  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder To state my argument slightly differently, perpetrators’ performances in The Act of Killing impart that impunity is founded frighteningly and at once on the predatory manipulation of the social imaginary in support of entrepreneurial sovereign subjectivity and neoliberal economics; as well as through performances rooted in bodily memory (as when Anwar demonstrates his murder technique with a garroting wire or when he retches), the spectacularization of violence, and willful ignorance. Adi’s performances in The Look of Silence are no less dramatic for being anchored in layers of ­vulnerability—he and his family’s corporeal and emotional suffering in conjunction with his self-precaritization enacted as the right to look. Whereas in The Act of Killing, performativity and spectacularization work together to produce the vertigo that destabilizes the dominant social imaginary, in The Look of Silence it is the unexpected, multi-faceted portrayal of vulnerability that yields those same effects—in addition to Adi’s insistence on his own political standing. Two key terms frame my analysis of how The Look of Silence is at once disruptive and productive on aesthetic and political grounds. First, its cinematic discourse is evocative both in the conventional sense of the word, to characterize its affective pull, and in its heterotemporal meanings. To evoke, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means to call forth, to call into being, to call up from the past, and to summon—it describes ways that meaning can be newly created as well as how the past can be made present and propelled into the future. Thus, the film as an evocatory and evocative text (generating memories and feelings) invokes the second key term, responsivity, which I borrow from Wendy Hesford’s essay, “The Malala Effect.” In contradistinction to the “responsive state” that Martha Albertson Fineman calls for on behalf of the vulnerable subject, responsivity (to be responsive), located among viewers, listeners, and interlocutors, is “to acknowledge the disruptive rhetorical work that others do.”77 In the context of the film, the responsivity the film occasions through Adi’s confrontations provides a foundation for the communal, cultural, legal, and political work that should follow. In other words, in the film, responsivity between vulnerable subjects calls out its failure in larger social institutions. Responsivity also opens an important avenue for the pursuit of justice that is too often foreclosed in both normative human rights and vulnerability theory. For the liberal subject of rights, claims are understood (and critiqued) as bids to restore sovereign subjectivity. Given that sovereignty is all too clearly not intrinsic to the subject, as human rights discourses proclaim, but results from the distributed effects of biopolitical and geopolitical authority, including the authority that human rights bear, restoration depends upon the same logic of liberal subjectivity as do so many violations themselves. Vulnerability theory, however, is not immune to political danger. As Berlant has pointed out, vulnerability often invites a shift from “an idiom of power to an idiom of care” that objectifies vulnerability as victimhood precisely at the moment the subject’s political subjectivization might occur.78 The concept of

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  229 responsivity restores the subject to the political realm even as it reactivates that realm as a site of active negotiation, rather than the domain in which fixed goals may be achieved. Thus, responsivity belongs to the process Wendy Brown describes in which post-foundationalist thought “is forced to yield its insights about power to normative values generated by a deliberative democratic process itself attuned to the unmasterable dimensions of power.”79 In other words, responsivity keeps both the process of subjectivization and its pursuit of justice non-teleological. How does the film interrupt survivor’s silence and the historical narrative of national progress that demands and condones it? How does the film reimagine personhood in terms of an embodied and embedded vulnerable subject? And how does it evoke responsivity among its participants and viewers? The Look of Silence posits Adi as the viewer’s point of identification, and there is both tension and emotional release in each confrontation. Moreover, the camera lingers over Adi’s family, emphasizing the material, affective dimensions of daily life in scenes of water running down his father’s body during his daily bath or his daughter’s playful giggles. Those scenes are never simply present tense, however, as Ramli’s absence haunts their lives—in his parents’ emotional suffering, the family’s position in their village, the lessons in national history Adi’s children learn in school, and the undercurrent of fear that accompanies Adi on each of his optician visits. In the film, this intersubjective groundwork of the deliberative process that responsivity inaugurates is rooted in representations of differentially distributed, embodied vulnerability and imposed precarity: of the body’s capacity for injury, debilitation, and failing; the subject’s capacity for love, care, violence, communication, and compassion; the village and region’s structures of privilege and precarity; the geopolitical forces that contributed to the New Order government and condoned and supported its violence; and the contemporary expression of those forces that ironically provided access for the filmmaking project. These forms of vulnerability are represented in the images of the film as well as through its process. In one heartbreaking scene, Adi’s nearly blind and senile father, Rukun, crawls around a small bare room, seeking an escape. As representation, the scene reflects Rukun’s mental state: he is trapped in a debilitating fear, even though he has long forgotten why he is afraid or even, tragically, that he ever had a son named Ramli. In this sense, the scene dramatizes through one man’s pain the physical and psychological damage that the exclusions of visuality distribute socially. The scene is discomfiting because Rukun is so clearly the object of the camera’s gaze, such that to watch is to trespass on this intimate moment. Oppenheimer has described elsewhere, however, that this is the one scene in the film captured by Adi (Oppenheimer had given him a camera in order to record anything he found compelling for the film), who after trying unsuccessfully to comfort his father decided that the most honorable action he could take would be to document it. Here, too, Adi chooses the strategic deployment of

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230  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder vulnerability in order to insist on the right to look. Whereas Rukun is physically and emotionally trapped within a fear that knows no object, and thus cannot be met and assuaged, Adi mobilizes strategic vulnerability in order to negotiate its alternatives. In its evocative and evocatory capacities, the film calls forth memories of the past and their material and affective imprints on the present in order to call out the crimes and failures of the juridico-political order. In that way, it invokes what Constable calls the law’s particular and “peculiar temporality”: the future perfect (in grammatical, not ethical terms). As Constable argues, “[t]he present articulation of a legal speech act is necessarily incomplete in that it awaits a future to become what it is or will have been.”80 Whereas conventional human rights films gain affective purchase from human rights’ aspirational discourse (if only the law would have been and will be applied), The Look of Silence conveys a more unsettling message: that the organized, state-sponsored murders of Ramli and others were carried out in the name of securitization and with lasting impunity, such that networks of juridico-political governmentality have produced the “legal incapacity and nonrecognition” Colin Dayan calls “negative personhood.”81 Only a reinvention of the social imaginary in which survivors’ political subjectivity is manifest can initiate a turn toward justice. Justice, too, remains bound by the conditions of heterotemporality from which it is invoked. As Brown writes, “Justice demands that we locate our political identity between what we have inherited and what is not yet born, between what we can only imagine and the histories that constrain and shape that imagination.”82 The perpetrators’ performances in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence remind the viewer of how dangerous the process of imagining a different future might be. (Fig. 5.4) In one scene in The Look of Silence, for example, the subjunctive past and present converge when Adi asks a perpetrator, “If I came to you like this during the dictatorship, what would you have done to me?” The man replies, quietly and threateningly, intimating the violent power he still could choose to wield, “You can’t imagine what would have happened.” “You can’t imagine” is, of course, precisely the kind of silencing imperative that the larger work of the film seeks to interrupt. It does so by drawing attention to the ways in which survivors and perpetrators are constantly asked to reimagine the possible expressions violence might have taken in order to sustain the status quo, as well as by dramatizing an alternative to that status quo in the very conversation Adi has at this moment. In other words, the film produces conditions for countervisuality along with the political subjectivity that attends it. Survivors have had no foundation upon which to make a claim in the context of the neoliberal economic order that securitization is designed to protect and that favors the disembodied, rational, market-driven liberal subject. The deliberate mobilization of precarity in the film, therefore, provides a new subject position from which to imagine and to speak.

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  231

Figure 5.4  Adi Rukun and Amir Siahaan. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

Scenes such as the confrontation described above are evocative not only because of the display of Adi’s moral fortitude in his willingness to confront authority, but also because that willingness is so firmly entrenched in embodied vulnerability; and in these instances, too, the film is most compelling when its methods of intensification reveal the relation Rancière describes “between what is seen in public and the precise detailed practice behind it.” The relationship appears in “the specific strategy of an artistic approach: a way of accelerating or slowing time, shrinking or expanding space, harmonizing or de-harmonizing gaze and action, making or breaking the sequence of before and after, inside and outside.”83 Oppenheimer’s close attention to the film’s “policy,” as Rancière calls it in this same passage, disrupts singular narratives of history and the subject that a conventional visualization seeks to convey. The meticulousness of craft renders more complicated what may simply appear as a victim-survivor’s search for justice. A one-minute sequence that shows Adi’s mother, Rohani, chopping vegetables in her yard, overlaid with a conversation about what it is like to live amongst her son’s murderers, illustrates Oppenheimer’s approach. What is striking about this sequence is that it is emphatically ordinary, yet strangely disorienting. On the visual surface, viewers see an elderly woman alone, chopping vegetables—a shot that appears as though it could have been taken on almost any day of her adult life. In the accompanying soundtrack, however, Rohani expresses how the crimes of 1965–66 persist in her daily life, shaping her relationships with her community and kindling her perpetual grief for a son she cannot publicly mourn. When asked how she feels about living among perpetrators, she responds, “I hate them.” Whereas at first it seems as though the verbal elements—Rohani’s simple articulation of cause and effect—infuse the

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232  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder visual image with pathos, this interpretation falters with recognition that the sound and image of the scene do not correspond. Rohani’s voiceover is initially hard to place—is it a man or a woman’s voice, the woman in the image or someone talking about her? It initially appears as the latter, only to be revealed to be her own as the conversation continues, so that her voice becomes at once particular and representative. In addition, certain moments in this scene, when the camera changes angles and distance from the subject, reinforce the message that her social and physical vitality have been lastingly constricted by her son’s death. Just how constricted is difficult to pinpoint. A close-up shot of Rohani’s sandy foot next to piece of torn plastic invokes at once the imagined presence and material absence of Ramli’s mutilated corpse on the riverbank. When the camera moves out again to a longer shot of Rohani with her home behind her, it paradoxically shortens the time between 1966 and the present, between Ramli’s physical death and social death Rohani barely avoids: both the living and the dead appear to inhabit the space of negative personhood, and the line between them blurs. Moreover, Adi and his mother’s conversation and verbal proximity runs counter to the depiction of Adi’s mother alone, such that the scene has two competing soundtracks: the sound of the knife cutting through vegetables that corresponds to the image and the conversation between mother and son. The difference signifies a traumatic break in time and space caused by Ramli’s murder, and it invokes the film’s title. The look of silence—whether it is the silencing impunity of perpetrators in the market or a silence borne of survivors’ fear—is coded through Rohani’s statement of hate. At the same time, throughout the film, both Adi and Oppenheimer treat Rohani with tenderness, humor, respect, and understanding, such that in the logic of the film her expression of hate motivates Adi’s search for an alternative future that might suture divides between the family and the community and the present and the past, one that the film’s aesthetic strategy makes visible. Adi’s confrontations with perpetrators that follow this scene make clear the distinction between responsivity, which acknowledges a claim and potentially opens a fraught discursive field, and recognition and responsibility, which acknowledge an identity. As also occurs in The Act of Killing, the process of revisiting the past makes clear that although the events of 1965–66 have been fictionalized in the propaganda to legitimate the very real violence that took place, it is also through a determined effort of willful ignorance or that “failure of imagination” Oppenheimer describes that these fictions and their effects are maintained. In The Look of Silence, when Adi confronts his uncle who guarded Ramli in jail before he was murdered, or the family of a perpetrator who denies knowledge of their father and husband’s crimes, Oppenheimer provides the necessary context for viewers to understand that these denials of recognition and responsibility are clearly false. Thus, Adi’s work is disturbing not because he presents those he meets with a revelation—I am Ramli’s brother—but because he renders the continued denials impossible.

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  233 Whereas most of Adi’s meetings end unsuccessfully in threats, denial, and anger, in a late scene he meets with an elderly perpetrator and his caretaker daughter (Fig. 5.5). During that meeting, she learns about some of her father’s atrocities for the first time and asks Adi to forgive her father and to think of them as family. Although there are other moments in the film when Adi’s and Oppenheimer’s projects diverge, here they coalesce: Adi receives not just an acknowledgment but also acceptance of his “disruptive rhetorical work,” and Adi and the daughter’s ability to found civil discourse on ­responsivity—a situation that the film has made possible—also models for viewers one kind of ethically-motivated negotiation that might allow co-flourishing to take root. In this sense, the daughter’s responsivity anticipates the need for a larger truth and reconciliation process in Indonesia and it does so in the language of co-flourishing and affective, communal bonds, as opposed to humanitarian care.

Figure 5.5  Samsir and his daughter. Still from The Look of Silence (2014). Reprinted by permission of Final Cut for Real.

However, what appears to offer closure to the film is still, I maintain, radically vertiginous. First, the success of the scene as well as of Adi’s project more generally, depends on self-precaritization: Adi’s determination at once to expose and to compound his own vulnerability and that of his family. It is a dangerous political strategy for reconciliation that could easily fail. Oppenheimer has described the physical danger of making this film. Although no immediate harm came during the filming and, remarkably, the film premiered in two sold-out screenings in Jakarta, Adi and his family had to relocate to a safer community in another region of the country after the release. Second, the daughter’s responsivity—her willingness to hear, acknowledge, and respond to Adi’s story—dismantles the exclusions that

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234  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder sustained negative personhood; however, it does so through the redistribution of precariousness from Adi to her, in that her understanding of herself, her father, and her country must become unmoored in her responsivity. The significance of this redistribution is underscored by the horrific actions of perpetrators that the film recounts. The recurrent perpetrator testimony that blows apart the quiet realism of The Look of Silence is that members of the death squads would slit their victims’ throats and drink their blood in the belief that doing so would protect the killers from going crazy. Here that “limbo land” Herzog and Morris describe between what is unbelievable and what is real reasserts itself to make closure all but impossible. What might it do to the daughter’s understanding of her world to learn her father had done such a thing in order to stay “sane”? In what grotesque and ethically complex ways does this knowledge (revealed at home, in a meeting with a victim’s brother) make visualizations of family and of reconciliation nearly unimaginable? To its credit, the film does not attempt to answer those questions. Rather, it discloses the political potential and important limits of mobilized precarity and vulnerability.

Conclusion: Cinematic Effects What happens when there are no officially sanctioned channels for human rights, or when fear forecloses most conversation about atrocity, or, as David Harvey argues, when rights are limited in their effectiveness because they are tethered solely to a neo-liberal focus on possessive individualism84? Although not conventional works of advocacy, Oppenheimer’s Indonesia films create a public forum for the representation of atrocity in what was largely a vacuum of human rights talk within Indonesia. In rendering performance of atrocity as performance, The Act of Killing strips away the veneer of national emergency, displaying the violence as scripted, enacted, and spectacularized for political gain. The film’s cultural work enables both participants and viewers (and some are both), in Diana Taylor’s words, to “explore how performed, embodied practices make the ‘past’ available as a political resource in the present.”85 The Look of Silence alters who has access to that resource, by creating a means through which political subjectivity can take place and documenting that process. Although I have focused throughout this chapter on how theories of political subjectivity and visuality can open up deeper readings of the films than may be otherwise available, I want to conclude with a brief examination of their work, to return to Mirzoeff and Foucault, as “discourses with material effects.” The arc of justice explored through Oppenheimer’s aesthetic strategies is extended by the films’ extraordinary reception in Indonesia, where they have initiated critical, public discussion of the murders in conjunction with various local and national human rights organizations, even as some of the protests against the films have been violent. The Act of Killing was released in 2012, just one month before K ­ omnas HAM, the National Human Rights Commission, published the summary

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  235 report of its investigations into the events of 1965–66. That report found that the killings were the result of state policy (although murder was often outsourced to local militias) aimed at “exterminat[ing]” PKI members and sympathizers; took place on a “massive scale,” and included “inhuman acts resulting in loss of life and injuries”; and have caused survivors ongoing mental and physical suffering as well as social, civil and political discrimination.86 Although only the summary of the Komnas HAM report has been released, and the document as a whole remains classified, the findings include that: • •

•

These events occurred as the result of state policy to exterminate members and sympathisers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which was deemed to have conducted resistance against the state. This state policy was accompanied by acts of violence against citizens who were accused of being members of the PKI or sympathisers of the PKI on a truly massive scale which took the form of inhuman acts resulting in loss of life and injuries. In addition, the victims as well as the families of the victims and their descendants have suffered continuing mental distress because of discrimination perpetrated against them with regard to their civil and political rights as well as in economic, social and cultural affairs.87

Despite Komnas HAM’s legal authorization to investigate “The Case of the 1965–66 Tragedy” through laws passed in 1999 and 2000, right after Suharto’s regime ended, the response from the Attorney General’s office, legally charged with follow-up investigation and prosecution, has been negative. In November 2012, the Jakarta Globe reported that the Attorney General’s office rejected the report on the grounds that it failed to meet the “formal and material requirements” for an official investigation; meanwhile, key members of the House supported the decision to let the case languish.88 The investigation by Komnas HAM overlapped with the filmmaking project. In the three months between the release of the Komnas HAM report and the Attorney General’s rejection of it, The Act of Killing premiered at the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals to enormous critical acclaim. When The Act of Killing was first released, response within Indonesia was muted, although the National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia wrote to the filmmakers: “If we are to transform Indonesia into the democracy it claims to be, citizens must recognize the terror and repression on which our contemporary history has been built. No film, or any other work of art for that matter, has done this more effectively than [The Act of Killing]. [It] will be essential viewing for us all.”89 News of the film appeared initially in Indonesian media in the form of reviews of foreign screenings, as the film itself was banned and the official culture that would find humanitarian assistance on behalf of survivors and judicial review of the crimes “overkill” was still firmly entrenched. A coordinated campaign between the director, Komnas HAM, and survivor, student, labor, journalist, teacher,

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236  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder and legal organizations began showing the film at private screenings, and it has since been geoblocked to make it available as a free download within Indonesia. Within the first six months of the film’s release, over 600 articles about it and the atrocities appeared in the Indonesian media, including a special 75-page double issue of the national newsmagazine Tempo, which conducted its own investigation into the events of 1965–66, and a documentary program produced by Al-Jazeera Asia TV.90 In a sign of how the discourse around the mass murders has been altered, two months after the premier of The Look of Silence, the editorial board of the Jakarta Globe wrote: History cannot be unwritten, but the story we tell ourselves and our children can and must change. If our nation is ever to improve its standing in its own people’s eyes—to say nothing of the world’s— the stories we tell must evince reflection on our nation’s greatest shame.91 Rather than being cultural texts that critique the normative horizon or present a definitive alternative, the films blow open the storytelling process and the limits on who participates in it. I have discussed their work in terms of vertigo to insist upon its dizzying rather than necessarily salutary and comforting effects. Vertigo challenges the authority of sovereign subjectivity and the visual authority to which it is attached, but does not posit a new anchor. Instead, vertigo generates intense visual referents that transform the imagination of “political forms reinvented by reference to the multiple ways the visual arts invent gazes, arrange bodies in particular locations and make them transform the spaces they cross.”92 Such staging reconfirms the complex relationship between cultural and political imagination, and the films conclude precisely on the threshold where the necessary political work of redress must begin.

Notes 1. Forché, “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art,” 137. 2. Forché, “Reading the Living Archives,” 137, original emphasis. 3. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976–1980,” 802. 4. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.” 5. I am profoundly grateful to Joshua Oppenheimer for giving me access to the Director’s Cut (159 min.) of The Act of Killing and to The Look of Silence before their general releases. The discussion of The Act of Killing is based on that long version. 6. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-Symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57. 7. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 12. 8. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 108. 9. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 5–6.

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  237 10. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 3. 11. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 24. His model of countervisuality, or Visuality 2, draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theories of History 1 and History 2. In chapter one, I discuss the potential of History 1 and 2 to reify the very categories Chakrabarty seeks to disrupt, by tying History 2 too closely to romanticized tropes of cultural difference. 12. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 60, quoted in Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 25. 13. Oppenheimer uses the term “genocide” to describe the mass murders, based on the definition of political and ideological genocide offered by Helen Fein. See, for instance, Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective and “Revolutionary and Antirevolutionary Genocides: A Comparison of State Murders in Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) and Indonesia (1965–66).” 14. Oppenheimer, “Director’s Statement,” www.theactofkilling.com. 15. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 2. 16. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.” 17. Rancière, “Introducing Disagreement,” 7. 18. For a much more extensive historical context, see Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre and Its Legacy” as well as Anderson, “Impunity.” Two monographs focus respectively on the political context within Indonesia and US involvement in Suharto’s assumption of the presidency: Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder and Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968. 19. Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, 7. 20. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.” 21. Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer: ‘The Act of Killing’: Q & A at Lincoln Center Part I.” 22. Helmi, “Indonesia: The Act of Glossing.” 23. Oppenheimer, “Historical Context.” 24. Simpson, “Denying the ‘First Right’: The United States, Indonesia, and the Ranking of Human Rights by the Carter Administration, 1976–1980,” 799–800. 25. Anderson describes how perpetrators in Medan had erected “their own monument to themselves, a 30 foot high chrome ‘66’ next to the city’s railway station” to compensate for their perceived lack of formal recognition from the government (Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment”). 26. Oppenheimer, “Act of Killing Q & A – TIFF12.” 27. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 352. 28. Anderson’s “Impunity and Reenactment” traces this alliance from its colonial roots up through the revolution and independence eras. 29. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, 98. 30. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 57. 31. Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human–Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism, 176. 32. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, “Show of Force: A Cinema-Séance of Power and Violence in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt,” 289. 33. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, “Show of Force,” 289. 34. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 83. 35. For an example of these critiques, see “Examining Violence: The critical potentials of superiourity and mockery in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer,

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238  In the Aftermath of Mass Murder Cynthia Cynn, & Anonymous, 2012).” Film Antidote (blog). 1 September 2014. www.filmantidote.com/the-act-of-killing. 36. Godmilow, “Killing the Documentary: An Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker Takes Issue With ‘The Act of Killing.’” 37. Godmilow, “Killing the Documentary.” 38. Bradshaw, “Build My Gallows High.” 3 9. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 48. 40. Oppenheimer and Uwemedimo, “Show of Force,” 291, 290, 304. 41. Fraser, “The Act of Killing: don’t give an Oscar to this snuff movie,” The Guardian, 22 February 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ feb/23/act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia. 42. Kenneth Turan, “Review: ‘The Act of Killing’ re-creates Indonesian Slaughters,” The Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2013. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/25/ entertainment/la-et-act-of-killing-review-20130726. 4 3. Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, 225. 4. Behlil, “The Act of Killing: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” 28. 4 45. Pamela Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.” Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer. BOMBlog. 18 December 2012. http://bombsite.com/1000/articles/6992. 4 6. Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity (Los Angeles: Sage Publication, 2007), 12. 4 7. Matsinhe, Apartheid Vertigo, xi. 4 8. Dawes, Evil Men, 56. 4 9. Dawes, Evil Men, 4. 50. Berlant, “Intuitionists: History of the Affective Event,” 847. 5 1. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.” 5 2. Oppenheimer, “Director’s Statement.” 5 3. Dawes, Evil Men, 34. 54. Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer, Zagreb Dox, 27.02.2013.” 55. Moore, “Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” 482. 56. Geoffroy, “Joshua Oppenheimer .talk/‘The Role of the Artist.’” 5 7. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.” 58. Oppenheimer, “TIFF 2012 The Act of Killing Intro and Q&A.” 59. Oppenheimer, “Joshua Oppenheimer, Zagreb Dox, 27.02.2013.” 6 0. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 26. 1. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 194. 6 62. Anderson, “Impunity and Reenactment.” 6 3. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 184. 4. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 180. 6 65. Oppenheimer, “Act of Killing Q & A – TIFF12.” 6 6. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.” 6 7. See Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. 6 8. Cohn, “Joshua Oppenheimer.” 69. Oppenheimer, “TIFF 2012 The Act of Killing Intro and Q&A.” 70. Oppenheimer discusses this exorcism in Oppenheimer, “TIFF 2012 The Act of Killing Intro and Q&A.” 71. Melvin, “Review: When Perpetrators Speak.” 2. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 21. 7 7 3. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 20. 74. Herzog and Morris, “Werner Herzog and Errol Morris Talk About ‘The Act of Killing.’”

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In the Aftermath of Mass Murder  239 5. Moore, “Film After Atrocity: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” 481. 7 76. Oppenheimer has discussed Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) as a film that comes close. The difference lies in the fact that those imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge were able to compel their former guards to participate, which indicates the guards’ power had dissipated (Personal Interview, 9 November 2014). 77. Hesford, “The Malala Effect,” 143. 78. Berlant in Puar, “Precarity Talk,” 166. 79. Brown, Politics Out of History, 90. 80. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 75. 81. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog, 140. 82. Brown, Politics Out of History, 147. 83. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 103. 84. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 51. 85. Taylor, “Performance and/as History,” 68. 86. Statement by Komnas HAM (National Commission for Human Rights) on the Results of Its Investigations into the Grave Violation of Human Rights During the Events of 1965–1966. 87. Statement by Komnas HAM. 88. As reported in the same article, one politician commented that “the government had done the right thing by restoring the political rights of the family members of former PKI members and that any further gesture of humanitarian action would be overkill.” Rangga Prakoso, et al. “AGO Rejects Komnas HAM Report on 1965 Massacres,” The Jakarta Globe, 12 November 2012. http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/ago-rejects-komnas-ham-report-on-1965-massacres/. 89. Quoted on the film’s website, www.theactofkilling.com. The quote is taken from a letter on 27 June 2011 from Yosep Adi Prasetyo on behalf of the National Human Rights Commission, Komnas HAM, to the filmmakers. 90. The BRITDOC Foundation, “The Act of Killing.” 91. “Leadership to Look at Past Long Overdue.” The Jakarta Globe, 13 November 2014. http://thejakartaglobe.beritatsu.com/opinion/editorial-leadership-look-atpast-long-overdue/. 92. Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, 126.

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Index

Abani, Chris 23–24, 32–33, 42, 46–49, 53–58, 60, 62, 97 activists 3–4, 12, 73, 169, 174; for HIV/AIDS treatment programs 159; for compensation from the Bhopal Union Carbide explosion (1984) 25, 114–15, 122, 124, 126, 141, 149–50 Act of Killing, The (film) 26, 199, 201–3, 205–10, 227–8, 234–36; and performativity 210, 213; performativity and vertigo in 214–26; and vertigo 211–14 advocacy 24–25, 114, 122–5; critical 116–17, 129–33, 144, 145, 148–9 aesthetic vulnerability 171–7 Afghans during Soviet invasion 160, 171, 179–81 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child 41 Agamben, Giorgio 7, 9, 10, 14, 25, 157–9 Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) 123–4 Alien Tort Statute 124–5 Amar, Paul 22, 167, 177 anachrony 55, 58, 71, 88, 92, 94 Anderson, Benedict 88, 145, 222 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje) 130 Animal’s People (Sinha) 114, 118, 131, 132; civic epistemologies and toxic exposure in 143–7; vulnerability and toxic exposure in 136–40 Anker, Elizabeth 13 anti-colonialism: in Indonesia 204; in Zimbabwe 70–71, 74–76 Anwar, Waseem 144 appeal for aid 168–71 archive: censorship in 76, 87; facticity and abstraction characteristics 81; reflecting Zimbabwe historiography 73, 75, 78, 83, 85, 89, 105–7 archivization 71, 73

Arendt, Hannah 14 atrocity 26, 47–48, 52–53, 58–59, 164, 169; aftermath of 198; as legitimate function of governmentality 200, 204, 209; in Zimbabwe 69–107 author as witness 177–8 Azoulay, Ariella 71 Bankoff, Gregory 16 bare life 4, 7, 9–12, 14, 19, 25, 173, 191–3; and national sovereignty 157–9 Bartholomew, Pablo 128 Bataille, George 34 Baxi, Upendra 2, 116, 117, 120, 121, 146 Beah, Ishmael 60–61 Beasts of No Nation (Iweala) 32–33, 42, 43, 46–47; expendability and revaluation in 48–53 Bee, Rashida 150 Benjamin, Walter 91, 94, 104 Berlant, Lauren 16, 214, 228 Bhabha, Jacqueline 35 Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act 121 Bhopal Medical Appeal 126–9, 131, 168 Bhopal Union Carbide explosion (1984) 24, 113–51; compassion for victims of 133–6; continuing liability and legal contexts of 120–5, 133, 144; jurisdiction over 120–5; justice 113, 115–22, 125, 138; legal representation in 120–1; mediatization of 125–9 Bildungsroman 34, 42–44, 47–49, 53, 59, 140 biopolitics 11, 16, 18, 157–62, 181 Bones (Hove) 85 Brauman, Rony 164, 165, 167 Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi 70, 73, 75–81, 88, 93, 96, 106

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256 Index Brown, Kate 16 Brown, Richard D. 159 Brown, Wendy 93–94, 104, 229 Buell, Lawrence 143–4 Burma 160, 171 Burma Chronicles (Delisle) 161, 171; irony and self-critique in 187–91 Butler, Judith 15, 18–20, 32, 34, 46, 59, 72, 76, 82 Campbell, Horace 73, 97 Cape Town Annotated Principles and Best Practices of 1977, 39 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJPZ) 70 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 45–46, 145, 148 Chan, Stephen 79 Cheah, Pheng 2–3 Chihambakwe Committee report 78 child: definition of 39–40; pathologized by adults 41; recovery and social reintegration of victim 40 childhood: defined 41; ideal 35; innocent 47; vision of 23 child soldiers 8, 23; contradictions in legal definition of 43; demographics 37; dual status as victims and perpetrators 23, 31, 35, 62; global implications of conflict 47; and legal qualification 32–33; literary representation of 42–45; and narratives of criminality 42; politics of space and time 45–48; representing modernity 46 chimurengas 74, 92, 98, 106 China versus U.S. human rights struggle 2–3 choice equated with freedom 5 Chouliaraki, Lilie 168–9, 172, 175, 186, 192 Chowdhury, Elora 169 chronotope 9, 119–20, 132, 137, 144–45, 148, 163, 191–92 Chute, Hillary 170, 177–8, 182, 193 citizenship 2–4, 9, 32, 59, 157; novelization of 42 Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission 13 civic epistemologies (Jasanoff) 25, 114–16, 131, 141, 143–8 co-flourishing 17–18 Cole, Teju 14 collective consciousness 74 Comaroff, Jean 158

Comaroff, John L. 158 Communist threat in Indonesia 8, 26, 199, 204–6 compounded vulnerability in fiction 129–33 Cone, Jason 183 Congo, Anwar 199, 205, 212, 216–18, 226; moral development of 221–4 Congo-Brazzaville 171 Constable, Marianne 6, 37, 230 Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) 23 corporation’s legal liability in a foreign country 120–5 corpus delicti 129–30, 135 Coundouriotis, Eleni 54, 74, 92 counter-performances 209 countervisuality 200 Craps, Stef 211 criminality, narratives of 42 critical advocacy 116–17, 144, 145, 148–9; in fiction 129–33 Cubilié, Anne 169 culture: differences and victimhood in the context of Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 133; incommensurablity concerning Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 142–3; values impacting definition of childhood 35, 39–40 Dabney, Ben (character) 86, 89–90 Dale, John 123 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi 188–9 Dawes, James 212–15 Dayan, Colin 9, 46, 230 debility 138–9 dehumanization 138–9 Delahunt, Meaghan 25, 114, 132 Delisle, Guy 25, 161, 171, 187–91 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 144 Democratic Republic of Congo 183 dependency 15–16 derivative dependency 15–16 Derrida, Jacques 35, 47–48, 55–56, 58, 69, 71, 74, 75, 94, 104 de Torrenté, Nicolas 183 Devi, Mahasweta 25, 114, 132, 142–3, 145, 147–8 Dickens, Charles 159 Dingani, Mavuso 89 Dingo, Rebecca 16 disarmament-demobilizationrehabilitation (DDR) (Harlow) 34, 47 disaster capitalism 118

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Index  257 disaster imagery 128 dissensus 8, 9, 11, 14; within visuality 200 Doctors Without Borders. See Médecins San Frontières (MSF) Doe v. Unocal 123–4 Dow Chemical 115 Drapchi Prison 14, 1 Driver, Dorothy 91, 92, 97, 99 Dudai, Ron 81 Dui Hua Foundation 2 Dumbutshena Report 78 embodied vulnerability 17, 24, 30–32, 120, 138–40 embodiment as condition of human rights person 13–14 entanglement 45–46, 62; in the postcolony 33–34; of temporalities 91, 92 entrepreneurial subjectivity 206–7 Eppel, Shari 105 ethics 18, 48, 59, 132, 144, 177, 182; and politics 20; reasoning 135 Ethiopia’s famine 160, 171 eventness of Bhopal 118–19 evocative capacity 228, 230 Ewing, Katherine Pratt 33 exclusionary practices with oppressive nationalism 73 Fassin, Didier 161, 179, 191–2 fearless speech 11 feminism/feminist: and paternalism 72–73; perspective to violence 89–95, 98, 101–2, 104; politics and vulnerability 20 Fifth Brigade 71, 75–76, 89, 93 Fineman, Martha Albertson 15–16, 20, 228 First Chimurenga 92, 98 Fletcher, Ian Christopher 122 Forché, Carolyn 198, 201 Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo (Haviv et al.) 161, 183–87 Fortun, Kim 122, 132, 133 Fournot, Juliette 180–2 framing, democratic 142 Fraser, Nancy 125, 142 Fraser, Nick 210 freedom 3–4, 39, 41, 101, 167, 207; equated with choice 5, 22; and insecurity 22, 204, 213

Fuster, Angela Lorena 72 future-to-come in The Stone Virgins 91–105 gender: idealizations and Zimbabwean’s violence 73, 92, 95, 98–102, 107; and suffering 184; and victimhood with Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 133, 140, 149–51 generalizability of human rights (Stanton) 116–18, 141 geographies of injustice (Baxi) 116, 146 gestures function as structures of feeling 56 ghosts 58–59 Gilson, Erinn 19, 206 Glendon, Mary Ann 21 Godden, Rob 127 Godmilow, Jill 208 Godwin, Peter 76–77, 90 Gordon, Avery 48, 56, 58, 69 governing through insecurity 199 governmental precarization 21 graphic narrative 177–8, 182 Grear, Anna 15, 16–17, 21, 30, 31, 115–16 Green Revolution (India) 119, 121, 124, 125, 146 Grewal, Inderpal 5 grievability 18–19 Guantánamo Bay 19 Guibert, Emmanuel 160, 171 Gukurahundi 8, 24, 69–107; fictional accounts of 85–107; human rights reporting of 76–85; silence about 75–80, 84, 86–87, 90; woman’s perspective of 85 Handley, George 144 Harlow, Barbara 34, 47 Harvey, David 234 haunting 23, 55–57, 62; of child soldiers as subjects 45–48; as historical residues and memories 69–107; in Shadows (Hove) 86–88 Hauser, Gerard 11 Haviv, Ron 25, 161, 171, 183 Hawley, John 33 Hedges, Chris 182 hegemony 3, 35, 47, 56, 72, 75 Hesford, Wendy 14, 32, 170, 174, 228 heterotemporality 3–4, 9, 48, 69, 209, 213, 230; of human rights 3–4, 7, 9 Higgins, Lesley 130

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258 Index historiography 89 Hitchcock, Peter 119, 212 HIV/AIDS activism 159 Honwana, Alcinda 37 Hope, Trevor 78 Hopgood, Stephen 5, 45 Hove, Chenjerai 24, 70, 74, 85–88, 107 humanitarianism 126–34; changing meaning of 159–60; gendering 183–91; inequality of lives in 179; and Médecins San Frontières (MSF) 156–7; and politics 158–9; shaping public opinion 161–2; structure of an appeal 168–71; and vulnerability of distant victims 160 humanitarian spaces 167–8 human rights 1–12, 45–48, 55, 59–61; abuses in Tibet 1–3; in Bhopal 25, 113–51; capitalization of 16–17; and child soldiers 30–42; corporatization of 16, 115, 117, 120, 122–3; defined 5–6; dynamic nature of 117; generalizability of 116–18, 141; and the Gukurahundi 69–96, 104–7; and humanitarianism 156–9; interrelated with neoliberalism and securitization 3–4; with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 25, 156–93; and politics of language 142–3; shaped by neoliberalism and securitization 3; and the social imaginary 113–14; transforming vulnerable subjects 4–6; UNsponsored 23; vulnerable subject of 2, 4, 12–23; in Zimbabwe 24, 69–107 human-security states 167–8 hypervisibilization 168 identity categories of vulnerable populations 16 idiom of disgust (Miller) 223 idiom of witness 179–80 Indonesia: fear by victims in 199, 204; 1965–66 genocide 8, 26, 198–236 intercorporeality 16, 31 irony in Burma Chronicles 187–91 Iweala, Uzodinma 23–24, 32–34, 42, 47, 49, 52, 58, 60 Jagal (film) 199 Jasanoff, Sheila 114, 118 justice 230

Kaarsholm, Preben 99 Kaiwar, Vasant 46 Kamm, John 2, 4, 13 Kaplan, E. Ann 170 Keenan, John 121, 124 Kehde, Suzanne 148 khã (character) 137–8 Kilgore, James 24, 70, 74, 85–86, 88–90, 107 Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell) 124 Knight, Gary 25, 183, 185 Koto, Herman 207, 217–19 Kratochvil, Antonin 25, 183, 185 Ladefoged, Joachim 25, 183, 185–6 land as a source of spiritual culture 85, 88 landscape, reclaiming in Zimbabwe 97–98 Laqueur, Thomas W. 129–30, 159 law of nations 124 Lefèvre, Didier 25, 177–82 legal personhood 12–13, 116, 121 Legal Resources Foundation 70 legal speech acts 6–7 legal subjectivity 116 Lemercier, Frédéric 177–8 Leps, Marie-Christine 130 Levinas, Emmanuel 18, 20, 83, 173 liability for Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 120–5, 133, 144 liberal subject of human rights 2–4, 7, 9–13, 15–17, 21, 23, 139 liberation movements 37–38, 53, 69–70, 73–105 literary humanitarianism 118–19 literary imagination 132 Lloyd, Moya 20, 72 Lobengula 99, 104 logic of expenditure (Mbembe) 36, 46, 55 longue durée 84, 119, 137, 163, 212 Look of Silence, The (film) 26, 199, 202–3, 206, 208–10, 234–6; producing vertigo 213–14; vertigo and vulnerability in 226–34 Lorey, Isabell 15, 20–22, 199, 204 Machel, Graça 38 Mackey, Allison 60 masculinity: and control in Indonesia 207–8, 217–18; and violence 51–52, 85–86, 92, 98–103 Maslin, Janet 33

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Index  259 master-slave relationship 14 Matabeleland 75–77, 79–80, 89, 90, 92 Matsinhe, David M. 212 Mawson, Andrew 38 Mbembe, Achille 3, 23, 33–34, 36–37, 45, 51, 60 Médecins San Frontières (MSF) 8, 25, 156–93; humanitarian spaces 167–8; operational neutrality 164, 167, 189; and Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders, The (Guibert) 177–83; publicizing injustices 163–5; and Sahel: The End of the Road 171–7; structure of an appeal 168–71; témoignage 161–7, 183–7, 191–3 mediatization of Bhopal Union Carbide explosion (1984) 125–9 memory 91–92, 120, 130, 213 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 13, 31 Merry, Sally Engle 30 Midlands 70, 75, 79, 92 Miller, William Ian 222, 223 mind/body duality 7, 9, 17 Minow, Martha 53 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 26, 200, 202, 205, 213 Mlambo, A. S. 105 mobility with agency 190–1 morality of irony 169 moral vernacular 11 Moretti, Franco 42, 43 Morsink, Johannes 21 motherhood, idealized 134–5 mourning: as conjuration 53–60; critical 47, 76, 83, 85; experienced in Gukurahundi 82–86; and political community 76, 84; politics of child soldiers 46–48 Moyn, Samuel 166 MSF-CH 189 MSF-FR 189 MSF-H 189 Mugabe, Robert 24, 70, 73–77, 79, 83, 85, 88–90 Mukherjee, Pablo 125, 138 Nachtwey, James 25, 183, 185 Naimou, Angela 9–10, 158 Nash, Kate 142 national belonging 101–2 nationalism 19, 24, 215; in Zimbabwean 71, 73–76, 86–88, 92 nation-state 23

Ncube, Pius 75 Ndebele 72–75, 78, 80, 92, 97, 99, 106 necropolitics (Mbembe) 34 negative legal personhood 9–10, 230 Nehanda (Vera) 98 neoliberalism 22, 138, 139; impacting human rights 3, 5; and precaritization 114–15 New Order government 26, 198, 207–9, 221 Nigeria-Biafra Civil War 33, 43, 53 Nixon, Rob 132, 138 Nkomo, Joseph 74 normalization of the unacceptable 186 novelization of citizenship 42 novel of formation 47 Nussbaum, Martha 132, 147 Ohlin, Jens David 13 Ondaatje, Michael 130 Ono, Takamitsu 122 Onstable, Marianne 203 Operation Drama 75 Oppenheimer, Joshua 26, 198–236; The Act of Killing (film) 214–26; The Look of Silence (film) 226–34 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child 32, 39 Orbinski, James 161, 162, 163 Otto, Dianne 149 pan-Africanism 41 Pancasila Youth 206, 215, 218, 224 paradox of evil (Dawes) 215 paramilitary securitization 206–7, 218 parents’ responsibility for children 36, 41 parrhesia 11 Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) 204, 235 paternalism 15–16, 20, 72–73; and child soldiers 38 patriarchal model of liberation 73 peasantry and giving voice to 87 Pengkhianatan G30S PKI (G30S) 207–8, 216, 217, 221 performativity 210, 213; in The Act of Killing (film) 214–26; in films 202 perpetrators of atrocity 203–4, 209–10, 213; confronted by survivors 227; imaginations 220–1; perspective 212; re-imagination of their crimes 215–17 personality development 44 personhood 115; negated by law 9–10; negative 230

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260 Index phenomenology of the subject 13, 17 Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders, The (Guibert) 160, 171, 177–83 photographic narratives of Médecins San Frontières (MSF) 160, 170 photography, documentary-style 168 Pickering, Jean 148 poem as witness to atrocity 198–9, 201 political community and vulnerability 72 political consciousness 31 political prisoners 1–2 political sovereignty 34 political subjectivization 26, 32, 34, 47, 55, 199–200, 227 politics: and humanitarianism 158–9; of memory 47–49; and vulnerability 20 postcolonialism 46, 130; and child soldiers 38 post-humanitarian form of appeal 169 precaritization: terminology 23; through neoliberalism 114–15 precarity 15, 18–19, 21, 61, 70, 72–74, 76, 140, 173, 230; in Indonesia 199; in The Look of Silence (film) 202, 213; and politics 20; terminology 23 prisoners of conscience 11 privatized security and individual freedom 206–7 Process of Injury Evaluations 119 projection of person onto film 205–6 Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (Devi) 114, 118, 131, 149; civic epistemologies and toxic exposure in 147–8; discourses of toxicity and cultural incommensurability 140–3 Puar, Jasbir 69, 138 Pupavac, Vanessa 41, 42 Radiance of Tomorrow (Beah) 60–61 Raftopoulos, Brian 105 Rai, Raghu 24–25, 120, 127, 128, 133, 137 Rancière, Jacques 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 53, 199–200, 225 Ranger, Terence 98 reconciliation in Zimbabwe 105–7 Red Book, The (Delahunt) 114, 118, 131, 149; limits of compassion in 133–6 Redfield, Marc 88 Redfield, Peter 161, 162, 166, 167 refugee 157–8, 193

reintegration into society 60 relationship of shared dissociation 51 Renan, Ernest 75 Report, Machel 38 representation aspect of justice 125 resilience of subject 15–16 responsive state 15–16 responsivity 228–9, 233 return and regain concept 60 Ritchin, Fred 171–2 rights equated to freedom 4–5 rights holder and moral agent 41, 42 Roberts, John 124–5 Roosa, John 204, 210 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 3 Rosen, David M. 38 Rowland, Tiny 77 Roy, Alka 122 Royal Dutch Petroleum 124 Rukun, Adi 202, 209, 226 Rukun, Ramli 226, 232 Sahel: The End of the Road (Salgado) 160, 171–7 Salgado, Sebastião 25, 160, 171, 174–7, 185, 192 Sam, Suara 128 Sambhavan Trust 126 Sambhavna Medical Clinic 126 Samuelson, Meg 91, 92, 97, 99 Sangdrol, Ngawang 1–2, 4, 10–12 Sarangi, Sathyu 118 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 49 Scarry, Elaine 103 securitization impacting human rights 3, 5 security 21–26, 31, 45, 60–61, 82; and human framework 167–8, 191; in Indonesia 199, 204–8, 213; and vulnerability 22 self and the Other 18 self-critique in Burma Chronicles 187–91 self-precaritization 10 Senyap (film) 199 sexuality: and suffering 184; and violence 51–52 Shadows (Hove) 70, 85–88, 107 Shiva, Vandana 146 Shona 70, 72, 74–75, 78, 80 Shukla, Chandra Devi 150 Sibanyoni, Mxolisi R. 74, 86, 87 silence: in Indonesia’s 1965-66 genocide 201; and violence 26

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Index  261 Silverman, Kaja 209 Simpson, Bradley R. 205 singing nuns of Drapchi prison 1 Sinha, Indra 25, 114, 126–7, 132, 136, 139, 145–7 Sinik, Ibrahim 222 Sisulu, Elinor 80, 82, 84 Slaughter, Joseph 4, 42, 44, 47, 49, 53, 80, 118, 133–4 Smith, Ian 92 social bonds, destruction of 43 social conformity 53 social disintegration due to modernity 44 social imaginary 6–9, 13–14, 114–15, 117, 200, 205, 213 Sokhi-Bolley, Bal 126 Song for Night (Abani) 32–34, 42, 43, 46–47, 62; mourning as conjuration 53–60 sovereignty 5–6, 11; and Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 121–4; and humanitarianism 158–9; and persecution in Indonesia 206–7; producing bare life 157 Spargo, R. Clifton 83 spectator of photography moved to different roles 168–9, 172, 176 spectrally human 23, 32, 34, 35, 47 spectrapoetics 56, 58 spiders, metaphor of 100–1 Spivak, Gayatri 95, 118 Stanton, Donna 116, 117, 123 Stephens, Sharon 40 Stone Virgins, The (Vera) 70, 85–86, 91–105, 107; atrocities of the past and an undetermined future 94; ethico-aesthetic representation of violence 97; heterogeneity of 93; narrative authority 103; politics of witnessing violence 96–97 strategic vulnerability 30–31, 60–62 Strauss, David Levi 174 structural injustice 18 subaltern subjects 45–46, 72, 86, 119 subjectivity 8–10, 12–14, 17–18, 149, 168 Suharto, President 26, 198, 204–7 survivor testimony 224–6 Suryono 225–6 Taylor, Diana 234 témoignage 25, 191–3; in Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the

Congo (Haviv) 183–87; repurposing 156, 161–7 temporal debris field 200 temporal heterogeneity 62 Terry, Fiona 189 Tibet and human rights abuses 1–2 Tibet Information Network 1 Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front 171 toxic exposure in Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 114–16, 118, 126, 136–48 transnational corporate responsibility 116–19, 122–5 trauma 211–12 Trelford, Donald 76–77 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) 73 Tsvangirai, Morgan 88 Turan, Kenneth 210 Tutuola, Amos 49 Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) 115, 121 Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal 8, 113–51 Union Carbide of India, Ltd (UCIL) 121, 125 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 32, 34–36, 39–41 Unity Accord of 1987, 75 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, 3 universalism 117 UN Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights 114 U.S. versus China human rights struggle 2–3 Uwemedimo, Michael 207 Vera, Yvonne 24, 70, 74, 85–86, 91–105, 107; articulating the past historically 93–95; literary responses to violence 91–105 vertigo 26, 201–2; in The Act of Killing (film) 211–26; in The Look of Silence (film) 213–14, 226–34 victimhood 3, 4, 7, 9, 10; in Bhopal Union Carbide explosion 133; feminized 73; and vulnerability 20, 26, 30, 72

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262 Index VII photo agency 183 violence: ethico-aesthetic representation of 97; linked to vulnerability 19–20; and masculinity 51–52, 85–86, 92, 98–103; politics of witnessing 96–97; routinely performed 214–26; and sex 51–52; and silence 26; and sovereignty’s ongoing illegitimacy 82; state-sponsored 69–107; in Zimbabwe 69–107 visuality 200, 202, 207, 213, 217–18, 221, 229; historical and cinematic contexts of 203–10 visual narratives: of Médecins San Frontières (MSF) 160, 170; and representations of human rights 14 voyeur to protester 168–9, 172, 176 vulnerability 2, 4, 12–23, 82, 149; aesthetic 171–7; of child soldiers 35–36; compounded 113–15, 129– 33, 136–40; embodied 17, 24, 30–32, 120, 138–40; and entrepreneurial subjectivity 206–7; for feminist politics 20; in fiction 84–85; and humanitarianism 160; imposed 115, 118, 120, 124; linked to violence 19–20; in The Look of Silence (film) 226–34; in Oppenheimer films 202; and security 4–5, 22; strategic 30–31, 60–62; terminology 23; to toxic exposure 114; and victimhood 26, 30, 72, 228; visual depiction of 25–26 vulnerability theory 4, 10, 15–18, 72–73, 115–16; and generalizability of human rights 117

Walker, David 183 Ware, Owen 94, 104 We Are All Zimbabweans Now (Kilgore) 70, 85, 88–90, 107 Weissman, Fabrice 166 Weizman, Eyal 162, 167 Werbner, Richard 76, 87 Wessells, Michael 37 West Africa 33 white-savior industrial complex (Cole) 14 Wilkins, Lee 125, 126 Williams, Bernard 83 Wilson, Richard A. 81, 84, 159 witnessing in the aftermath of an atrocity 198–236 witness poetry 198–9, 201 women’s rights 5, 150, 186 Young, Jock 212 Zangpo, Ngulchu Thogme 135 ZANLA/ZANU 74 ZANU 92 ZANU-PF 74–75, 100 ZAPU 92 Zimbabwe 8; ethnic differences and violence in 73; intranational violence 74–76; lack of reconciliation in 105–7; liberation struggle 85–86; national identity 80; nationalism 74–76, 92–105; national politics 86–88; rhetoric of national security 24, 78; violence 24, 69–107 ZIPRA 92, 100 ZIPRA/Z 74 Zulkadry, Adi 221